Did ancient peoples of Egypt and the Near East really imagine

themselves as facing the past, with the future behind them?

Lloyd D. Graham

Linguistic studies in Egyptology, Assyriology and Biblical Studies harbour a persistent

trope in which the inhabitants of the Ancient Near East and Egypt are believed to have
visualised the past as in front of them and the future as behind them. Analyses of the spatial
conceptualisation of time in language have revealed that the opposite is true of almost all
modern cultures, with speakers seeing themselves as facing the future and the past as
behind their backs. To date, only one language (Aymara, from the Andes) has been proven
to employ the reverse orientation in its main spatial metaphor of time. Cognitive Metaphor
Theory provides two spatiotemporal models that use different reference points – Event-RP
vs. Ego-RP, also called Sequence vs. Deictic – and are therefore mutually exclusive. In
modern languages, including English, key spatiotemporal prepositions/adverbs from the
former model can stray into the latter while retaining their original temporal meaning.
Taken literally, the resulting expressions indicate that the speaker is facing the past, an
orientation that happens to align with the powerful KNOWLEDGE IS VISION metaphor.
Lexical drift of this kind is also likely to have occurred in Egyptian and the Semitic
languages. Correcting for the “mixed metaphor” problem permits ancient speakers of
Egyptian, Akkadian, Ugaritic, Hebrew, etc., to have adopted the same spatiotemporal
orientation as most modern people. However, very recent studies (2014–18) show that
informants with a cultural or religious focus on the past tend to visualise past events as “in
front of them” irrespective of the spatiotemporal metaphors in their language. Such
mappings seem to be static rather than dynamic. It is therefore inappropriate to envisage
ancient thinkers as walking backwards into the future or as sitting with their backs toward
the source of the “river of time;” rather, we should imagine them stopping frequently on
life’s path in order to turn about-face and contemplate the (temporal) terrain already
traversed by their society. Traditional societies whose aim is to return the world to its
original perfection may even see the past and future as interchangeable.

1. Introduction
Natural languages make extensive use of space as a conceptual metaphor for time; all – or
almost all1 – languages use at least some spatial terms as expressions of temporal relations. In
Cognitive Metaphor Theory, the TIME IS SPACE metaphor corresponds to a mapping from a
concrete, tangible source domain (space) to a conceptually more abstract target domain
(time); we use the former to facilitate our comprehension of the latter.2
Every language allows its speakers to employ a range of spatiotemporal metaphors, and these
need not be compatible with one another. In English, we are free to visualise time as forming
a horizontal sequence (“the past is behind me, a bright future lies ahead”) and then to
describe the consequences of a particular decision as “cascading down through the years,” as
if time ran vertically from above (earlier) to below (later). Then we may observe that, “up to

1
now, we have done okay,” as if the past were below the present and the future above it. In
Irish, you can specify “after lunch” with the phrase i ndiaidh an lón, (lit. “behind lunch”)
which suggests a horizontal timeline, but to say “for the past year” you would use le bliain
anuas, lit. “with the year downward,” where anuas suggests that time flows from above to
below.3
The same discontinuities are found in ancient languages, such as classical Hebrew. Psalm
77:5 reads “I have considered the days of old (‫)מקדם‬,” where the temporal term (miqqedem)
corresponds to the positional “front” or compass point “East,”4 both of which suggest a
horizontal distribution of time, yet in 1 Sam 30:25 we read “From that day upward (‫ )ומעלה‬he
made it a statute and an ordinance for Israel,” as if time flowed vertically from below to
above. Latin has two linear metaphorical schemes, a horizontal one where the future is in
front of the author and the past behind him/her, and a vertical one where time flows from
above to below.5 In addition, Latin can distinguish between linear and cyclical time.6 In
Egyptian, the counterparts of these two concepts in eternity – D.t and nHH 7 – respectively
convey everlasting “completedness” and “ongoingness,” complementary categories that in
turn reflect the aspect of the verb – the perfect(ive) and imperfective, respectively – in the
language’s grammar.8 Latin is but one of many languages in which one can also conceive of
time in wholly non-spatial terms, e.g., as a commodity or as money that can be “weighed”
and “spent.”9 For the ancient Egyptians, time could also be envisaged a container that an
individual was obliged to fill10 – much as we ourselves speak of “filling in time.”
Despite the availability of multiple conceptualisations of time in a language, most of its
speakers/authors will tend to favour a particular model, which is usually one of the spatial
metaphors. For modern English-speakers, the dominant timeline is horizontal11 – perhaps due
to the prevalence of graphs and charts in the information stream of Western society, where
time is invariably plotted linearly along the horizontal x-axis (in mathematical parlance, the
“abscissa”).12 In terms of personal self-orientation, we overwhelmingly position ourselves
within this horizontal timeline with our faces toward the future and our backs to the past13 –
in this paper, we will investigate this model of time, and its verbal articulation, more closely
in Section 3.
Interestingly, linguistic studies in Egyptology, Assyriology and Biblical Studies harbour a
persistent trope in which the inhabitants of the Ancient Near East and Egypt are believed to
have visualised themselves in precisely the opposite orientation, with the past in front of their
faces and the future behind their backs. This view has attracted both fierce criticism and
dogged support. Investigating it is an interdisciplinary endeavour that spans philology,
linguistics, semantics, psychology and cognitive science. To some, the premise will be new;
to others, an old chestnut. But even those already familiar with the terrain may be surprised
by findings that have emerged only recently from the discipline of cognitive science, which
shed new light on an old argument.
One would be forgiven for thinking that a paper focused on the use of prepositions and
adverbs in ancient languages must necessarily be either uninteresting or incomprehensible,
but – using the bare minimum of specialist jargon – I hope to show that there is a story here
that is both thought-provoking and rewarding, and that the twists and turns of its plot are
accessible to all.

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2. Back to the future?
In a short but profound book titled Idea into Image: Essays on Ancient Egyptian Thought,
Erik Hornung writes “In Egyptian linguistic usage the future is behind: it is what human
beings, oriented toward the past, are as yet unable to see.”14 No doubt his view is motivated
by the use of simple prepositions such as xnt (“in front of”) and compounds containing bAH or
HAt (“front”) – such as m-bAH, m-HAt, r-HAt and Xr-HAt – to mean both “in front of” (spatial) as
well as “before” or “formerly” (temporal).15 Similarly, compound prepositions involving sA
(“back;” spatial) – such as Hr-sA – are used adverbially to denote “subsequently,” “later” or
“afterward” (temporal).16
A similar phenomenon occurs in the Semitic languages. In classical Hebrew, temporal
adverbs meaning “formerly” are often formed from ‫פנים‬, panim, the noun for “face,” which in
its spatial sense signifies “in front.”17 As anticipated in Section 1, an alternative is provided
by ‫קדם‬, qedem, which means both “in front” (spatial) as well as “of old” (temporal).18 Hans
Walter Wolff commented in 1974 that, in the Hebrew bible, “we see a relationship of time
that is different to the one familiar to us. It emerges even more clearly in a common Old
Testament turn of speech. The Israelite sees former times as the reality before him, whereas
we think that we have them behind us, as the past. Ps 143.5: I remember the days before me
(miqqedem).”19 Diana Lipton, writing much more recently, shares this view:20
I see Exod 33:23 as one of a number of biblical texts whose authors located the past in front
of them, since they could see it, and the future behind them, since they could not see it. Our
present-day conception of time is far from straightforward with regard to spatial orien-
tation. Sometimes [...] we see the future ahead of us, [...] but on other occasions we speak
of the future, say new generations, coming up behind. In Biblical Hebrew, a strong
linguistic case can be made for claiming that the future was physically located behind.
Meanings of the root word ‫[ קדם‬qdm] range from “original” and “early” through “past” and
“ancient” to “before” and “in front of,” while meanings of the root ‫[ אחר‬ʾḥr] include “after-
wards” and “end” (as in ‫אחרית הימים‬, “end of days”) alongside “behind” and “back.” [...] A
similar perception of time seems to have operated in classical antiquity; the Septuagint’s
[Greek] term for “back” in Exod 33:23 conveys the same spatial and temporal dimensions
as the Hebrew – behind and future, respectively.
The concept has become popular in Christian ministry:21
The Hebrew language has a peculiarity when it comes to the looking back at the past and
facing the future – it has the two concepts switched up entirely. The word for yesterday,
‫( אתמול‬etmol) is connected to the concept of being opposite to, or facing something. We are
facing and looking directly at the past, not the future. Equally, the word for tomorrow, ‫מחר‬
(machar) is connected to the concept of being behind or after. The future is behind our
backs. We cannot see it. We have our back to the future, so to speak. We can see clearly
what has happened in the past, and God wants us to do that. But we are forbidden from
trying to see what’s coming.
Most support for the concept comes from biblical scholars; speakers of modern Hebrew
tend to dispute the idea that their language orients them with their backs to the future.22
In a book titled The Mythic Mind: Essays on Cosmology and Religion in Ugaritic and Old
Testament Literature, Nicolas Wyatt explains that “The Ugaritic aḫr and its derivative forms
[...] probably have a basically spatial sense, ‘behind’, which is used metaphorically in a

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temporal sense, with reference to the future. [...] This is also the sense of ʾaḥar in Hebrew.”23
Later, he elaborates:24
The radical qdm may be defined as the spatial and temporal antonym of aḫr. [...] The basic
sense appears to mean ‘before the face’ [...] The metaphorical and temporal sense [is]
‘before’, that is, ‘past’, and often with a sense of ancientness, of primordiality [...] When
the temporal senses of the terms qdm and aḫr are used, it is with a nuance of facing back –
or more accurately facing forwards – into the past, and of having the future behind the back.
This is perhaps most powerfully illustrated in a relief on the wall of the Seti I temple at
Abydos in Egypt. [...] Seti stands with his son (the future Ramses II) contemplating rows
of cartouches of the kings of previous dynasties. The past is before them.”
In his chapter on Ugarit in the Handbook of Ancient Religions, Wyatt reprises the linguistic
data and reiterates that “What this evidence indicates is that people ‘looked’ into the past,
with the future an unknown quantity behind them.”25 In the Handbook of Ugaritic Studies, he
extends the pattern to include cognate terms for front/past and back/future in Akkadian
(qudmu and aḫru, respectively) and for front/past in Arabic (qadam, qidm, qidam, etc.). He
also widens the correspondences to include left vs. right and the cardinal points of the
compass. He concludes that “The same pattern also obtains in other languages such as
Sanskrit, and is probably widely attested.”26
Using Akkadian examples as his workhorse, Stefan Maul arrives at the same conclusion. “If
we regard the Akkadian ... terms that designate ‘past’ and ‘future’... we make an astounding
discovery. [...F]or a Babylonian the past lay before him – it was something he ‘faced’;
whereas that which was coming, the future [, ...] was something he regarded as behind him,
as at his ‘back.’ In the mental world of our own modern society the exact opposite is, of
course, the case.”27
As hinted above in the quotation from Diana Lipton, the very same claim can made for
ancient Greek. “[T]he ancient Greeks regarded the past as what lay before them (prosso), the
future as what lay behind (opisso), i.e. their mental orientation was towards the known, the
traditional and the customary, unlike the modern ‘progressive’ outlook which tends to turn its
back on the past and its face towards the future.”28

3. Looking forward to it
As anticipated in Section 1, the orientation just established for the ancient thinker – his/her
face to the past and back to the future – is actually the opposite of the self-orientation shared
by almost all people in the modern world.29 Cognitive scientists Núñez and Sweetser express
it thus: “So far all documented languages [...] appear to share a spatial metaphor mapping
future events onto spatial locations in front of Ego and past events onto locations behind
Ego,” where by Ego they mean the thinker/speaker/author. It is certainly true that, in English,
this is our dominant mode of thought: we put unpleasant past experiences behind us and try
not to look back at them, preferring instead to look forward to a future in which the years
ahead of us will (hopefully) prove kinder.
Psychomotor tests prove that this is not just an abstract convention, but that we do in fact
visualise ourselves as facing the future. Ulrich et al. (2012) preface their German study by
observing that “in languages worldwide, there is a strong tendency toward the use of the
back–front axis where the future is mapped onto the front and the past onto the back.”30

4
Their experiments asked subjects to move a sliding control switch forward in response to
future-related sentences and backward in response to past-related ones, and compared their
response times with those from tests using the reverse directions. “From a psycholinguistic
point of view, the back–front dimension is particularly relevant because almost all languages
of the world associate future (past) with front (back). [...] Consistent with the notion of a
back–front mental timeline, faster responses occurred for the past–back and future–front
mapping than for the reverse mapping.”31 In other words, tests employing the future-in-front
mapping were congruent with the subjects’ perceived self-orientation with respect to time.
Other dynamic studies, including analyses of postural sway and gesture, “confirm the
cognitive reality of front–back mappings [...] originally noted by linguists.”32
The future-in-front orientation draws strong support from its congruence with the ubiquitous
LIFE IS A JOURNEY metaphor.33 Normally, we all walk forward with our eyes anticipating what
lies ahead, i.e., in the future, while those features of the landscape that we have just passed
slip behind us into (the near-homonym of) the past. In the modern world, the resulting
metaphor – TIME IS EGO’S MOTION ALONG A PATH – is considered to be universal, or very
nearly so.34

4. A muddle of models
From a joint consideration of Sections 2 and 3, one might conclude that a personal orientation
of past-in-front is a feature of ancient languages, or perhaps peculiar to Semitic and Afro-
Asiatic languages. However, Martin Haspelmath has shown that this is emphatically not so.
In From Space to Time: Temporal Adverbials in the World’s Languages, published in 1997,
Haspelmath systematically explored the spatiotemporal mappings in a sample of 50
languages – including Hebrew and Arabic, although not Egyptian or Akkadian. “The cross-
linguistic evidence overwhelmingly confirms the view that time is conceptualized in terms of
space, more particularly in terms of the frontal axis. A large number of languages from a
wide variety of families show this association either synchronically or diachronically. In
almost all cases, the front is associated with ‘before’ and the back is associated with
‘after’.”35 In other words, “in front” corresponds to earlier times and past events, whereas
“behind” represents later times and future events.
Since this is the same spatiotemporal mapping that we encountered in Section 1 for Egyptian,
Akkadian, Hebrew, etc., it is clear that the past-in-front model is not just a feature of ancient
languages, or a peculiarity of languages from Egypt and the Near East. Moreover, since
Haspelmath’s past-in-front ordering of the linguistic timeline is the opposite of the future-in-
front mappings attested for all languages in Section 3, we have some explaining to do.
The apparent conflict stems from the use of two mutually exclusive models whose
incompatibility stems from the use of different temporal reference points. In the first model,
commonly called Ego-Reference Point (Ego-RP),36 the thinker (“Ego”) provides the anchor-
point with respect to which the spatial terms are employed. Future events advance toward
Ego from the front (Fig. 1a) – or, equivalently, Ego moves forward towards future events
(Fig. 1b)37 – whereas past events recede behind him/her. It is what is known as a deictic

5
Fig. 1a. Ego-RP model, “moving time” variant. Future events advance toward the
thinker/viewer (“Ego”) from the front.

Fig. 1b. Ego-RP model, “moving Ego” variant. The thinker/viewer (“Ego”) moves
forward towards future events.

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 Fig. 1c. Event-RP model, side-to-side variant for readers of scripts that are read/written
left-to-right. The postion of the thinker/viewer (“Ego”) is not specified; events are
ordered relative to other events.38

model because the spatiotemporal terms reflect the situation relative to the thinker’s “now” –
“my future lies ahead of me, my past lies behind me.” The statements in Section 3 all use this
model.
In the second model, which we can call Event-Reference Point (Event-RP), the
spatiotemporal terms describe the relationship between events on the timeline without
reference to Ego – October is before November, bedtime is after dinner, etc. Some people call
this Sequence-time (S-time),39 the “field-based” scheme40 or the Time-RP model,41 but
“Event-RP” is a more helpful name because the position of one event relative to another in
the sequence is all that matters.42 In this model, sequential events may be likened to a flotilla
of ships sailing in a single line, one after the other, proceeding from the future into the past.
To grasp the concept, it may be easier at first to think of this as a side-to-side timeline rather
than a front-back one; specifically, a left-equals-earlier, right-equals-later timeline for those
whose language scripts are read from left to right (e.g. Indo-European languages; Fig. 1c) and
the reverse of this for those whose scripts are read from right to left (e.g. Semitic
languages).43 In this model, earlier events are in front of later ones, later events are behind
earlier ones. In our maritime analogy, the front of each ship – in nautical parlance, the “fore”
– arrives earlier than the rear end – the “aft” – does; the nautical terms (which preserve
archaic English usage) are even congruent with the temporal adverbs “before” and “after,”
respectively (Fig. 1c).44 Haspelmath’s analysis shows that the spatiotemporal terms “before”
and “after” (and the equivalent terms in other languages, such as ante and post in Latin)45
derive their validity from the Event-RP model rather than the Ego-RP one.
Haspelmath’s finding stems from the fact that, in the Ego-RP model, “the observer moves
from earlier moments to later moments and thus faces the future. [...] If the observer ‘looks
ahead’ to a future event, say, his death, then situations that are earlier than his death are ‘in
front’ of his death,” and thus “before” it (Fig. 2a). With regard to past situations, however,
the Ego-RP model makes a different prediction: “If the observer ‘looks back’ to a past event,
say, his birth, then situations that are earlier than his birth are ‘behind’ his birth,” and thus
“after” it, while ones that are later than his birth will now be “before” it (Fig. 2b). But

7
Fig. 2a. In the Ego-RP model (Fig. 1a/b), Ego looks ahead to his impending injury in an
explosion and subsequent death from those injuries. The explosion is “in front” of his death
and thus before it.

Fig. 2b. In the Ego-RP model (Fig. 1a/b), Ego looks back to his birth and his later purchase
of a motorcycle as a teenager.46 The motorcycle event is “in front” of his birth and thus
“before” it, but in all languages one would say that the motorbike came after his birth.

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Haspelmath’s study has shown that “anterior/posterior adpositions are never sensitive to the
deictic [i.e., Ego-based] past/future distinction – there are no languages that invert their
‘before’ and ‘after’ adpositions in past situations.” Since these two spatiotemporal terms are
independent of Ego, they necessarily derive from the Event-RP model.
To recapitulate: Haspelmath’s overall finding is that the spatiotemporal terms “before” and
“after” (and the equivalent terms in other languages) derive their validity from the Event-RP
model (Fig. 1c) rather than the Ego-RP one (Fig. 1a/b). This startling revelation means that it
is inappropriate to interpret the past-in-front features embedded in spatiotemporal adverbs as
indicating that the past is in front of Ego (the thinker, speaker or writer), as was done in
Section 2; they merely indicate that earlier events are in front of later ones.47 The past is in
front of the future, not in front of the thinker.

5. Tread warily!
The potential for confusion is exacerbated by the fact that different academics use identical
technical terms to signify models that are mutually exclusive. For example, Haspelmath calls
the Ego-RP model the “moving Ego” model and the Event-RP model the “moving time”
model,48 whereas for Núñez and Sweetser the “moving Ego” and “moving time” models are
both subtypes of the Ego-RP model – variants (anticipated in Section 4) that differ only in
whether one considers Ego to be moving forward along the timeline, like a walker on a path
(Fig. 1b), or stationary and allowing time to flow past him/her, like an island in a river (Fig.
1a).49 The confusion is compounded by Haspelmath’s attempt to distinguish between the
Ego-RP and Event-RP models using examples that are all Ego-RP and that actually only
distinguish between its sub-models in the sense of Núñez and Sweetser (e.g., “We’re
approaching the end of the year” vs. “Noon crept up on us”).50
That the terrain remains treacherous may be inferred from the following excerpt, taken from a
2012 publication on lexical semantics in ancient Egyptian: “There is substantial cross-
linguistic data to suggest that space and time are often expressed in similar ways, being based
on a horizontal axis (Haspelmath 1997: 57), with the past usually behind and the future
before a human being. This is certainly visible in the Egyptian compounds with HAt that
express relations of ‘in front/before.’”51 But these Egyptian compounds do not make visible
the future-in-front orientation described in the first sentence of the quotation – they
overwhelmingly refer to the past,52 and if they locate this temporal “before” in front of us,
they indicate a past-in-front perspective. The incongruity is passed over without
acknowledgement or explanation.53
Within the Semitic languages, there are complexities that serve as further traps for the
unwary, extending even to the apparent inversion of both the positional and time-related
meanings of a spatiotemporal term. Consider, for example, the Hebrew ‫( מחר‬maḥar, “behind”
or “after,” from Section 2) with the definition “tomorrow,” “in time to come.”54
Paradoxically, the Assyrian (Akkadian) cognate maḫru conveys precisely the opposite spatial
and temporal senses; it means “front, often of time, though always of former time, of old.”55
As we shall see later (Box A and Section 10), the Akkadian maḫar (from maḫārum, “to

9
face,” “to confront”) also signifies a frontal position, with maḫrum meaning “front.”56 Yet in
Section 2 we saw that the ostensible roots – Hebrew ʾaḥar (ʾḥr), Ugaritic aḫr and Akkadian
aḫru (Assyrian aḫrâtu, aḫrûtu) – all specify “back” and “future.”57

6. “Mixed metaphors” in modern languages

As mentioned in Section 1, languages employ a range of spatiotemporal metaphors. These
need not be compatible with one another, nor do they necessarily reflect the spatiotemporal
orientation of a speaker/writer. It is easy to imagine that the key spatiotemporal terms in
Event-RP statements (such as the prepositions from “January is before February” or “dinner
will be after nightfall”) might stray from their original context and be applied unthinkingly –
with retention of their original temporal meanings – in Ego-centred statements. Even if the
speaker envisages him/herself as facing the future, the resulting “mixed metaphors” would, at
face value, suggest the opposite. We see this happen in English when we speak of “the
generations who have gone before us;” this Ego-RP statement refers to people of the past, but
using the term “before us” (a borrowing from the Event-RP world) does not mean that we
actually perceive the past to be in front of us. Neither does speaking of “the generations who
will come after us” or “those coming up behind” mean that we must picture ourselves as
facing away from the future. With a healthy dose of Orwellian double-think, we can speak of
our “forebears” while localizing them mentally as our “hindbears.”
An analogous process can be demonstrated for other modern languages. In Irish, the phrase
roimh Chríost means “before Christ.” Since it could mean either in front of Christ (as in “we
will all be judged before Christ”) or earlier than Christ (as in “the last few centuries before
Christ”), one could again argue that the ability to call our ancestors ár n-aithreacha
romhainn, “Our fathers before us,”58 indicates a past-in-front orientation for the speaker. In
French, the avant-garde were the troops in front of the main army, while avant Jésus-Christ
indicates (like the Irish phrase) a time preceding that of Christ. Since the word denoting
temporal “earlier” and spatial “in front of” is the same, one could again argue that the ability
to call our predecessors ceux qui sont allés avant nous, “those who have gone before us,”
betrays a past-in-front orientation for French speakers.
As foreshadowed in Section 4, many languages spoken today – tongues as diverse as
German, Hungarian, Basque, Japanese, Chinese, Tamil, and Maori – use cognate terms for
spatial “in front” and temporal “before,” or spatial “behind” and temporal “after,” with some
doing both, so the phenomenon is widespread.59 The ease with which “mixed metaphor”
examples can be found in English, Irish and French suggests that one could find similar
diffusion of these spatiotemporal terms (with retention of their Event-RP temporal meanings)
into Ego-RP statements in most or all of these other languages. At face value, sentences
compromised by “lexical drift” of this kind would appear to show that speakers of these
languages localise the past in front of them and the future behind them. And yet, as we saw in
Section 3, speakers of all of these languages actually perceive themselves to have the reverse
orientation.

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Being independent of the speaker’s circumstances, the Event-RP model is likely to have
cognitive primacy over the Ego-RP metaphor,60 and this is consistent with the direction of
drift discussed so far.61 Although less common, there are also examples where Ego-RP
terminology seems to have drifted into Event-RP statements. In Japanese and Marathi (one of
the four main languages of India), certain phraseology can cause “in front” to mean “later”
and “behind” to mean “earlier” in statements about sequential events, which of course is
totally contrary to expectations.62 The phraseology in question seems to trigger an
(undeclared) Ego-RP perspective, which prompts the use of Ego-based spatiotemporal terms
in the Event-RP statement.63 In front/later mapping in Event-RP statements can also occur in
the African languages Hausa and Wolof, where again they are thought to arise from covert
introduction of an Ego-RP perspective.64

7. “Mixed metaphors” in ancient languages

As we have seen in Section 6, spatiotemporal “mixed metaphors” are found across many
languages, and the resulting hybrid-model sentences – sentences that mix incompatible
temporal reference points – should not be taken at face value. Ancient languages, too, tend to
use cognate terms for spatial “in front” and temporal “before,” or spatial “behind” and
temporal “after.” Latin is one,65 as we can see even from Latin usages in English: ante does
this sort of double duty in “antechamber” (the vestibule preceding the main room) and ante
meridiem (a.m., the part of the day before noon), while post does it in “postscript” (an
addition appended belatedly to the end of a text) and post meridiem (p.m., the part of the day
after noon). In Section 2, we have seen that double duty of the spatiotemporal kind occurs in
Egyptian, Hebrew, Ugaritic and Sanskrit. Just as with modern languages (Section 6), with
ancient languages we need to beware of instances where spatiotemporal terms from Event-RP
statements may have drifted into Ego-RP ones. Reflecting upon the Latin, Mark Liberman is
quite correct when he says “I suspect that the temporal applications of ante and post to time
came originally from thinking about a line of march of a group [our Event-RP], not the visual
field of an individual [our Ego-RP].”66 Where Event-RP terms have drifted into definite or
possible Ego-RP statements, such as first-person declarations, we need to refrain from taking
the resulting “mixed metaphors” literally and reading them as pure Ego-RP statements.
Specifically, as we have seen with modern languages, such statements cannot be used to
assign a spatiotemporal orientation to the thinker/speaker/writer.
Egyptian-language statements that employ spatiotemporal prepositions or adverbs (Section 2)
are for the most part straightforward Event-RP statements, such as sDm wa Hr-sA sn.nw=f n
rDi.t sDm Xr(.y)-pH(.wy) r-HAt Hr.y, “Each one is heard after his fellow, without one of low
rank [being heard] before one of high rank,”67 or bn-iw-nA gA (r) xpr m-sA=f an sp-2, “No
other will come into existence after him ever again!”68 If we allow for lexical borrowing of
temporal HAt- and sA-compounds (with their original temporal meanings) from the Event-RP
model, an ostensibly Ego-RP statement such as Spss.ki xr Hm=f r xpr.w m-HAt(=i), “I was
promoted under his majesty more than those who were before (me),”69 need not suggest that
its Old Kingdom author, Khentika-Pepi, actually considered his forerunners to be located in
front of him.

11
Similarly, most Hebrew statements that include spatiotemporal prepositions or adverbs
(Section 2) are straightforward Event-RP statements, such as the praise of King Josiah in 2
Kgs 23:25, “Before him (‫ )לפניו‬there was no king like him [...] nor did any like him arise after
him (‫)ואחריו‬.”70 Lexical borrowing of panim-, qedem- and ʾaḥar-derived terms with their
Event-RP temporal meanings into explicit or implied Ego-RP statements will result in “mixed
metaphors” that should not be construed literally. Accordingly, the Teacher’s boast in Ecc
2:7-9, “I also had great possessions of herds and flocks, more than any who had been before
me (‫ )לפני‬in Jerusalem [...] So I became great and surpassed all who were before me (‫ )לפני‬in
Jerusalem”71 need not mean that he envisaged the former inhabitants of Jerusalem as being
before his eyes. Likewise, in the prayer of Ez 9:10, “And now, our God, what shall we say
after this (‫?)אחרי ־זאת‬,”72 we should not read Ezra’s question as “what shall we say behind
now?” and conclude that his and his co-religionists’ backs must be set toward the future.
Moreover, most temporal uses of qedem and its derivatives are probably not Ego-RP
statements in the first place.73 Revisiting the quote from Ps 143:5 (Section 2), we find that
miqqedem is not really the Ego-RP expression that Wolff proposes (i.e., “before me”) but
rather an Event-RP one (“like beforetimes” or “as of old”).74 The same is true of other first-
person statements containing qedem-based temporal relations, such as the lament in Job 29:2,
“O that I were as in the months of old (‫)קדם‬.”75
In being required to refrain from a literal reading of spatiotemporal “mixed metaphors,” we
should remember that the same caveat applies to almost all metaphors and figures of speech.
For instance, we are required to translate Egyptian idioms such as ia ib, lit. “to wash the
heart,” non-literally in the sense of “venting one’s feelings,” and to render the semantic
content of ia Hr, lit. “to wash the face,” with “to exact vengeance.”76 If, in relation to a
potentate, we are told that a man is Hr mw=f, lit. “upon his water,” then we know that he is
loyal to that leader,77 as opposed to floating in one of his irrigation canals. In Akkadian, if our
subject is “carrying the face” of someone, then he or she is treating that person with
forbearance, as opposed to having flayed their severed head.78 In Hebrew, YHWH’s self-
description in Exod 34:6 as ‫ארך אפים‬, lit. “long of nose,” must be rendered as “patient” or
“slow to anger” if our translation is not to provoke well-deserved laughter.79 For
idiosyncrasies related to plurality in these languages, where hyperliteral readings must again
be avoided, see ahead to the final panel of Box A.
The examples in the previous paragraph show that, over time, phrases that originally were
visually active metaphors become purely literal fixed phrases that are used automatically.80
Incongruous imagery is especially likely to be elided, so the cognitive dissonance inherent to
spatiotemporal mixed metaphors such as “the generations who have gone before us” readily
slips below the threshold of awareness. Accordingly, the last part of Khnumhotep II’s claim –
“Greater were my monuments [...] than (those of) the ancestors, than the tombs which were
made before me (Xr-HA.t=i)”81 – may not have stimulated much spatial imagination on the
part of the author or of the readers of his biography at Beni Hassan.

8. Why has the past-in-front concept proved so persuasive?

Since ostensible past-in-front-of-Ego statements in ancient Egyptian and classical Hebrew are
relatively infrequent, and since their status as truly deictic statements is often less than

12
certain, one must wonder why the idea of a past-in-front self-orientation has proven so
persistent in the scholarship of ancient languages.82
A strong incentive to read potential or actual “mixed metaphor” statements as the product of
a genuine past-in-front-of-Ego orientation comes from the fact that placing the past before
our eyes is consistent with the ubiquitous and powerful KNOWLEDGE IS VISION metaphor. We
know what has happened but not what will happen, so there is an undeniable cogency to the
idea that our faces are turned to the past, while the future creeps up on us from behind,
unseen and unknown.83 This is the variant of the Ego-RP model that Núñez and Sweetser
would call “moving time”(Section 5), since we are stationary while time flows past us (in this
case, from behind) (Fig. 3a).
We can, of course, equally well imagine a “moving Ego” variant (Fig. 3b).84 As Leon
Derczynski puts it, with modern languages in mind, “some have suggested that we travel
through time facing backwards, because we can only see the past and not the future.”85 Brent
Strawn attributes precisely the same concept to ancient Semites: “Hebrew conceptions of
time seem oriented [...] with the speaker evidently facing the past, since ‘the past’ is ‫ קדם‬/
qdm, a word related to what lies ‘before’ or ‘in front of,’ which means the speaker rows
backward into ‘the future,’ which in Hebrew is related to ‫ אחר‬/ʾḥr, “behind.”86 In an article
titled “Walking Backwards into the Future,” Stefan Maul similarly credits the Akkadians:
“While we [moderns] advance along a time-line that has us ‘facing the future,’ the
Mesopotamians advanced along the same time-line but with their eyes fixed on the past. They
moved, as it were, back-to-front – backing into the future.”87
Attribution of this “moving Ego” variant to classical Hebrew is especially popular in
Christian ministry. The homiletic example quoted in Section 2 continues: “We have our back
to the future [...] Like people walking backwards, we cannot see what we’re walking into.”88
Equally: “The Old Testament people teach us that the future is behind us and the past is in
front of us. The Hebrew word for past means ‘in front of’ and the word for future means
‘behind.’ We have hope for the future because of God’s fidelity to us in the past. That’s how
we move forward, with our eyes locked on God’s loving deeds in the past.”89
It is worth pointing out that we have already witnessed two appeals to the KNOWLEDGE IS
VISION metaphor in in Section 2. One came from Erik Hornung: “In Egyptian linguistic usage
the future is behind: it is what human beings, oriented toward the past, are as yet unable to
see.”90 The other was from Diana Lipton, who – in respect of Hebrew – spoke of “biblical
texts whose authors located the past in front of them, since they could see it, and the future
behind them, since they could not see it.”
One may wonder whether any spatiotemporal terms reflect the idea of the unseen and
unknown future being concealed behind Ego. Haspelmath notes that in some languages
“behind” carries the additional sense of “hidden,” which makes logical sense in that a person
cannot see things hidden behind obstacles or objects located behind their head.91 In Egyptian,
however, it is not “behind” that carries the meaning of “hidden” or “unseen” but rather imn,
the positional term that denotes the right-hand side and – by extension – Imn.t, the West,92

13
Fig. 3a. Past-in-front-of-Ego model, “moving time” variant.93 Future events advance
toward and past the thinker/viewer (“Ego”) from behind, unseen and unknown, whereas
past events are seen and known.

Fig. 3b. Past-in-front-of-Ego model, “moving Ego” variant.94 The thinker/viewer (“Ego”)
travels backwards into the future, which is unseen and unknown, whereas past events are
seen and known.

14
given that the canonical orientation for an ancient Egyptian was southward, facing toward the
source of the life-giving Nile.95 And rather than Imn.t being the home of the “hidden” future,
Egyptians always associated the West – where the sun “died” every evening – strongly with
the realm of the dead, the netherworld inhabited by people of former times.96 Its ruler, the
“Foremost of the Westerners” is equated with the past:97 “As for yesterday, that is Osiris.”98
There is little comfort here for anyone wishing to claim that Egyptians located the future
behind them because it was hidden.

9. All just a terrible misunderstanding?

At this point, one might well suspect that the whole notion of ancient Egyptians and Near
Easterners visualising the past as in front of them and the future as behind them is just a
misunderstanding born of a frequent failure to identify the correct temporal reference point in
their spatiotemporal expressions (Event-RP, rather than Ego-RP), a failure that encourages
literal readings of “mixed metaphors” where the two models have been fused together.
This is certainly the view of Michael Streck, whose primary focus is Akkadian. Explaining,
in 2016, the source of confusion in a manner analogous to Sections 6 & 7 above, he takes aim
at Maul and others who attribute a past-in-front orientation to ancient Near Easterners:99
Unfortunately, the rich linguistic literature on the subject, ignored by these authors, makes
it clear that this statement [i.e., the supposed past-in-front orientation] is based on a
misunderstanding of the linguistic facts in several aspects, and therefore also the concl-
usions for a specific Mesopotamian or Ancient Near Eastern conception of time are
untenable. This was already pointed out by several authors before [...] In a study ten years
ago100 which aims to warn Ancient Near Eastern scholars against drawing naive
conclusions from linguistic facts onto the minds of speakers of ancient languages, basing
myself on two articles of Traugott, I again refer to parallels between Akkadian and Indo-
European, but also to other languages such as Chinese, I refute the explanation of the
phenomenon given by Wilcke, Maul, Selz and Archi, and I give instead the commonly
accepted explanation in linguistic studies.
Later in the paper, Streck adds “In English, German and other languages, the time moving101
[i.e., Event-RP] metaphor and the ego-moving [i.e., Ego-RP] metaphor are not mutually
exclusive, but are rather used side-by-side in different expressions. The same is true for
Akkadian.” In conceptual terms, of course, the two models are mutually exclusive, but what
Streck means is that speakers of many languages unthinkingly mix together the two
incompatible metaphors, and that this is not just a modern phenomenon.
In passing, it is interesting to note that the same charge – of confusion between Event-RP and
Ego-RP statements – has been levelled at scholars of East Asian languages. As Günter
Radden writes:102
For example, a term like FRONT may refer to the deictic sphere lying in front of the observer
[Ego-RP] or, as the head of a sequence [Event-RP], to a past point in time (Chin. day-front
‘a few days ago’). Since the same forms are used to mark different spatio-temporal
arrangements, people, including scholars, sometimes confuse the opposing uses of ‘front’
and ‘back’ and hence are, for instance, led to believe that, for speakers of Chinese, the past
is in front and the future is behind.

15
Clearly, attempts to exoticise certain societies with respect to time-perception on linguistic
grounds are not limited to cultures of the distant past; similar claims have also been made for
contemporary peoples of the Far East.

10. Why, then, are ancient future-in-front expressions so infrequent?

If the past-in-front-of-Ego orientation attributed to ancient Egyptians and Near Easterners is
truly spurious, one might expect to find an abundance of figures of speech that indicate the
reverse orientation. Expressions that are congruent with a speaker’s intrinsic temporal
orientation are likely to be more effective, and therefore more frequent, than ones that seem
to contradict it. This is the case in English, for example, where the expressions with an
apparent past-in-front personal orientation, such as “the generations who have gone before
us” and “those coming up behind” (Section 6), are outnumbered by expressions with a future-
in-front orientation, such as “looking forward to next week” or “thinking back to his glory-
days.”
An examination of spatiotemporal figures of speech in a representative corpus of texts for
Egyptian and Hebrew – William K. Simpson’s The Literature of Ancient Egypt and the
NRSV103 edition of the Hebrew bible, respectively – revealed surprisingly few expressions
that correspond to explicit future-in-front mappings in the original language (Box A). These
findings were supplemented by a possible Akkadian example found while searching through
versions of the Epic of Gilgamesh (Box A). As proof that the author positioned the future in
front of him, none of these figures of speech are entirely convincing. More frequently
encountered in the exercise were LIFE IS A JOURNEY metaphors (Box B),104,105 which imply a
future-in-front orientation insofar as a traveller normally directs his or her gaze toward the
path about to be traversed (Section 3). A third category involves expressions in which past
events are considered to be gone, forgotten, and out of sight – and thus, by implication,
behind (Box C). At best, however, examples from the last two categories provide only
indirect evidence for the innate temporal orientation of their authors.
It is only in highly specialised publications on the topic of temporal prepositions and adverbs,
written by experts in the relevant ancient languages, that a few definite examples of a future-
in-front orientation (such as use of the spatial “in front” to denote a future event) emerge to
view. For Egyptian, Camilla di Biase-Dyson cites just two examples: i wn hrw(.w) dy r-
HA.t=Tn, “Oh, what a day there is before you” and bw rx=k n m(w)t n anx pA nt.y r-HA.t=k,
“You can’t tell whether life or death is that which lies before you.”106 The future-in-front-of-
Ego meaning for HA.t-compounds is very limited, being restricted grammatically to r-HA.t and
historically to the late New Kingdom.107 For Akkadian, Michael Streck can cite only one
example of this type: nišū maḫrâte tanittaka lišmâ,108 “May future (lit. in front (of me/us))
people listen to your praise.”109 This uses a term related to maḫar in the example from
Gilgamesh (Box A); on the semantic complexity of Akkadian maḫru and aḫru, see Section 5.
Note that the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary translates the same sentence as “May the people

16
Box A. Future is forward of Ego in figure of speech – few of these, most weak

Egyptian
xpr Aw Hr m Hw ib m wA n n.t(y)t n iyi.t, “He who looks too far ahead will become
disquieted, so do not dwell on what has not yet befallen.”110 Tale of the Eloquent Peasant.
Uses Aw Hr, “farsighted,”111 lit. “long of face,” where face = vision.
iTi.n=f m swH.t iw Hr=f r=s Dr msi.tw=f “While still in the egg, he [King Senwosret I]
conquered, and his face was toward it since he was born.”112 Story of Sinuhe.
Awy=i ib=i ‘n(n) r-HA.t, “I directed my thoughts to turn back to the past,” lit. “I directed my
thoughts to turn back in front.” Attributed in the Famine Stela to King Djoser.113
iw mwt m-Hr=i min, “Death is before me today” [continues: “(Like) the healing of a sick
man, Like going outside after illness.”]114 Dispute of a Man with his Ba. Uses m-Hr=i, lit.
“in my face.” It is the first of six stanzas with the same pattern, all starting with “Death is
before me today;” clearly the author’s potential death is in the future, and the similes
repeatedly compare it with the release at the end of a period of difficulty.

Hebrew
“The house of Israel shall know that I am the LORD their God, from that day forward.”
Ez 39:22. Uses ‫והלאה‬, “[then] and onward/further/beyond.”115

Akkadian
“He [Gilgamesh] will face a battle he knows not.” Epic of Gilgamesh, Standard
Babylonian version;116 Assyrian equivalent: “Thou didst affect him to go [...] to face an
uncertain battle.”117 Statements use maḫar, from maḫārum: to face, to confront, to
encounter, to withstand.118 Etymologically related to maḫrum, “ front,”119 rather than to
pānum, “front.” The plural of the latter – panū – provides the noun for “face”120 (cognate
with the Hebrew panim, Sections 2 & 7),* with related terms such as pana, panānum,
panātu, panītu, etc. used to represent the past, formerly, earlier, etc.121 On the semantic
complexity of Akkadian maḫru and aḫru, see Section 5.

* Curious Plurals. The Akkadian and Hebrew words for “face” are grammatically plural but semantically
singular, perhaps in allusion to a person wearing different faces for different emotions.122 The Hebrew word
for God, ‫( אלהים‬Elohim), is also grammatically plural but is considered to be the “plural intensive” or “plural
of excellence,” akin to the “royal we” in English.123 The Hebrew words ‫( מים‬mayim) “water” and ‫שמים‬
(shamayim) “sky,” are dual nouns,124 presumably a reflection of the cosmography of Gen 1:6 in which there
are waters above and below the earth. The Hebrew toponym ‫( מצרים‬Mizraim), “Egypt,” is also dual, in
keeping with Egyptian self-identification; ancient Egyptians always considered their king to be the Uniter of
the Two Lands (smA-tA.wy) of Upper and Lower Egypt.125 In the Egyptian language, some nouns that are
conceptually singular carry plural determinatives; these “collective nouns” are usually transliterated and
translated in the singular, e.g. mw, “water,” irp, “wine;” mr.t, “sickness/disease;” htp.t, “offering;” nbw,
“gold.”126 Sometimes the plural is transliterated, e.g., nfr.w, “perfection,” especially if the plural suffix (.w) is
explicit in the orthography, e.g. Htp.w, “peace; ” nxt.w, “victory/hostage.”127 Face, however, is grammatically
singular, Hr.128

17
Box B. Explicit journey metaphors, implying forward equals future – many of these

Egyptian
“The gaze of the steersman is directed forward, But the ship drifts of its own will.”129
Tale of the Eloquent Peasant.
“A man who looks in front of himself does not stumble and fall.”130
The Instruction of ‘Onchsheshonqy.
“The path of god is before all men. The troublemaker does not find it.”131
The Instruction of ‘Onchsheshonqy.

Hebrew
“Let your eyes look directly forward, and your gaze be straight before you. Keep straight
the path of your feet, and all your ways will be sure.”132 Prov 4:25-26.
“Yet they [= your ancestors] did not obey or incline their ear, but, in the stubbornness of
their evil will, they walked in their own counsels, and looked backward rather than
forward.”133 Jer 7:24.

Box C. Yesterday is gone and forgotten / out of sight / behind

Egyptian
“For a good disposition means being remembered, Even after years are past and gone.”134
Teaching for King Merikare.
“When one fights on the field of struggle with the past forgotten...”135
Teaching of King Amenemhet I.
“Whom can I trust today? There is no remembrance of the past.”136
Dispute of a Man with his Ba.
“And his Majesty answered, ‘About what will come to pass, for today has (already)
occurred and is past and gone.’”137 Prophecies of Neferty.

Hebrew
“For there is no enduring remembrance of the wise or of fools, seeing that in the days to
come all will have been long forgotten.”138 Ecc 2:16.
“Because you have forgotten me and cast me behind your back ...”139 Ezek 23:35.
“Our name will be forgotten in time, and no one will remember our works.” Wis 2:4.

18
of the present (day) hear your praise,” so the phrase “people in front [of me/us]” can be
construed as a spatial abstraction, without any sense of futurity.140
Streck, who strenuously opposes the attribution of a past-in-front-of-Ego orientation to
ancient Near Easterners (Section 9), admits the paucity of future-in-front figures of speech
and then ventures an excuse. “Indeed, expressions like ‘the future is ahead of me’, ‘the past is
behind me’ are practically not attested in Akkadian. However, the reason for this is most
probably not that these expressions do not exist in Akkadian but simply that the nature of the
textual record does not favour such expressions.”141 If correct, this circumstance is far from
universal for ancient cultures and their textual legacies. As William Short demonstrates with
copious Ego-RP examples, “one ‘looks backward’ (respicere) to past events in Latin [... and]
equally, one ‘looks forward’ (providere or prospicere) to future events.”142

11. Plot twist: Aymara speakers do face the past

Aymara is an Amerindian language spoken in the Andean highlands of Bolivia, Peru, and
Chile.143 Instead of the seemingly universal self-orientation in which the future is perceived
to be in front of the thinker/speaker (“Ego”)(Section 3), linguistic and gestural data show that
Aymara speakers have “a major static model of time wherein FUTURE IS BEHIND EGO and PAST
IS IN FRONT OF EGO.”144

As Núñez & Sweetser explain, “In Aymara, the basic word for FRONT (nayra, ‘eye/front/
sight’) is also a basic expression meaning PAST, and the basic word for BACK (qhipa, ‘back/
behind’) is a basic expression for FUTURE meaning.”145 However, Ego remains implicit, rather
than overtly marked, in Aymara Ego-RP expressions; an Aymara speaker never specifies that
it is the year “in front of me” or “in back of us.”146 It is for this reason that Núñez & Sweetser
had to recruit co-gestural data, which showed graphically that these expressions are in fact
deictically centred and function relative to the speaker’s present “now.”147 Aymara speakers
also use Event-RP statements, and in such non-deictic relations the passage of time is
indicated by left-to-right co-gestures;148 unlike Ego-RP relations, Event-RP ones may be
dynamic.149 The Aymara language emphasises visual perception as a source of knowledge,
and its speakers are required to distinguish – by grammar or inflection – events personally
witnessed from reports that are hearsay.150 Due to the language’s unusual stress on personal
knowledge, especially that gained through sight, Núñez & Sweetser hypothesise that an
Aymara-speaker’s temporal self-orientation is based on the KNOWLEDGE IS VISION
metaphor.151 The fact this static metaphor provides less elaborate inferential mappings
between the source and target domain than does the TIME IS EGO’S MOTION ALONG A PATH
metaphor may well account for its rarity worldwide.152 One of the missing correspondences
in the KNOWLEDGE IS VISION metaphor relates to scale, an issue considered in the next
paragraph.
Locations in front of an Aymara speaker and closer to him/her represent more recent times in
the past, whereas locations in farther in front of him/her represent less recent times in the
past.153 Kevin Moore agrees with Núñez & Sweetser that Aymara’s past-in-front-of-Ego
orientation draws its point of view from the KNOWLEDGE IS VISION metaphor, but points out
that the incremental mapping of ever less recent times onto increasingly farther distances in

19
front of Ego cannot be accounted for by a purely vision-based hypothesis. He therefore
suggests that Aymara draws its spatiotemporal sense of scale from the sequence of events in
the Event-RP model, where the past is indeed in front of the future and where distance in
space corresponds to distance in time.154 The resulting hybrid, in which Ego projects
him/herself into an Event-RP sequence so that he/she is facing in the same direction as the
“flow of events” is captured graphically in Fig. 4. Núñez & Cooperrider seem to anticipate
such a possibility from another direction when they say that the Event-RP model “inherently
involves an external perspective and whether it permits an internal form is unknown
(although recent experimental evidence suggests that this form can be enacted under specific
circumstances, for example, when acoustic stimuli and non-spatial (verbal) responses are
involved).”155
Recently, a co-gestural analysis of Eastern Khanty, an indigenous language of Siberia,
suggests that it too maps the past to in front of the speaker.156 There are also rumours that
gestures in some West African languages indicate a past-in-front self-orientation,157 although
an explanation dismissing some supposed examples in Wolof and Hausa has already been
intimated in Section 6. Other, more exotic, mappings have also come to light, all of them
from geographically restricted populations that follow a predominantly traditional lifestyle
and have low levels of literacy.158 For example, among the Yupno of Papua New Guinea,
whose homeland is situated on steep slopes, the past is construed as downhill and the future
as uphill, and – like the paths in their territory – the timeline is not a straight line.159 Paman-
speaking Australian Aborigines from Pormpuraaw, a remote Australian Aboriginal
community in Cape York, Queensland, map Ego-RP time using an axis based on compass
directions.160 As with Semitic languages (Section 1), the past is in the East and the future in
the West, a mapping that is presumed to reflect the fact that the sun rises in the East (earlier
time) and sets in the West (later time).161

Fig. 4. Ego projects himself/herself into the Event-RP sequence, oriented as if he/she
were one of the events.162

20
Naturally, discovery of the Aymara’s past-in-front self-orientation has encouraged those who
would like to attribute the same perspective to ancient authors. Having discussed the Aymara
situation, John Sanders writes in his 2016 book that “A few other languages, such as the
cognate languages Ugaritic and Biblical Hebrew, also construe the future as behind the self.
In both languages, achr means behind the physical body as well as the future while qdm
means both before/in front of the body and the past. [...] The motivation for why these
languages construe the future as behind the ego [...] is not yet understood.” Online, Edward
Cook describes the published work on Aymara temporal self-orientation and comments: “It
should be noted that Hebrew and Aramaic also have this perspective, to some extent. [...]
This is not a complete survey of all the time-related words and expressions in Aramaic and
Hebrew, but it’s enough to show that, cross-linguistically, Aymara is not alone.”163 The long-
standing counter-argument that sees the supposed past-in-front-of Ego orientation of Semitic
languages as an accidental by-product of “mixed metaphors” (Section 7) – reiterated most
recently and forcefully by Michael Streck (Section 9) – remains unacknowledged and
unaddressed; presumably it is either unknown or unpalatable.
Unfortunately, co-gestural data are not available for ancient speakers of Egyptian, Akkadian,
Ugaritic, or Hebrew. All we can say is that, as mentioned in Section 2, speakers of modern
Hebrew tend to disagree with the suggestion that their language orients them with their backs
to the future. In a 2013 review of spatial construals of time in current languages, Núñez &
Cooperrider left the nature of the Ego-RP model for modern Hebrew unresolved; their table
provided no entries for internal deictic time mapping or spatiotemporal metaphor, declaring
for the latter that “to our knowledge, the phenomenon has not been documented
systematically.”164 Interestingly, the two versions of horizontal spatiotemporal mapping for
Hebrew speakers that have been documented have opposite polarity; one runs left to right,
whereas the other runs right to left. 165

12. Traditionalism promotes a past-in-front personal orientation

In modern Arabic, as in European languages such as English and Spanish, the future is in
front of the thinker/speaker and the back is behind him or her. But a recent study has revealed
that speakers of Darija, a Moroccan dialect of modern Arabic, were likely to gesture and to
complete a simulated Ego-RP task test (Fig. 5) using a past-in-front-of-Ego orientation – in
opposition to the spatiotemporal metaphors in their language. In contrast, Spaniards – who
formed the experimental control group – tended to gesture and complete the Ego-RP task test
using the default mapping for the Western world, i.e., future-in-front-of-Ego. The study’s
authors, de la Fuente et al., reconcile the difference as follows: “Compared with many
Europeans and Americans, Moroccans tend to focus more on past times and older
generations, they are more observant of ancient rituals, and they place more value on tradition
(Mateo, 2010). Spaniards, by contrast, appear to have greater focus on the future, valuing
economic development, globalization, and technological progress.”166 Indeed, in a subsequent
questionnaire-based test of temporal focus, members of the Moroccan test group showed
about twice as much empathy with past-focused statements (such as “The young people must

21
 Fig. 5. The (simulated) Ego-RP task test. Test subjects were shown a cartoon character
viewed from above, with a box in front of him and behind him. They read that yesterday
this man went to visit a friend who liked plants, and that tomorrow he would be visiting a
friend who likes animals. In the Spanish/Darija version, subjects were told to write the
initial letter of the word for “plant” in the box that corresponded to past events and the
initial letter of “animal” in the box that corresponded to future events; in the Chinese
adaptation, the Chinese character for “plant” and “animal,” respectively, were to be written
in the boxes. The order in which plants and animals were mentioned, and their pairings
with “yesterday” and “tomorrow,” were counterbalanced across the test paper ensemble.167

preserve the traditions”) as did members of the Spanish control group.168 As might be
expected, enthusiasm for future-focused statements was lower among the Moroccans than the
Spaniards, although this difference was less pronounced.
A more fine-grained examination revealed that non-cultural parameters could also have a
bearing on the outcome of the Ego-RP task test. Within a group (only the Spanish one was
tested) there was a greater likelihood of a past-in-front self-orientation for older compared to
younger subjects.169 This was explained on the basis that “Seniors [...] may focus more on the
past because they are on the far side of the reminiscence bump (i.e., the period of years from
approximately age 10 to 30 during which the most frequently recalled autobiographical
events occur.”170 When a Temporal Focus Index (TFI) was calculated from the questionnaire-
based test for individuals across the two groups (-1 = strong past focus, +1 = strong future
focus), low TFI scores correlated strongly with a past-in-front outcome in the Ego-RP task
test.171
Pre-test conditioning – sometimes called induction, priming or training – in which (mainly
young) Spanish subjects were required by a writing exercise to focus on either their past or

22
their future, impacted the subjects’ temporal self-orientation. Specifically, in the Ego-RP task
test, the past-in-front outcomes for the past-conditioned group (46%) were far higher than for
the future-conditioned group (5%), with both differing from the frequency for an
unconditioned cohort (14%).172 While the previous tests had only provided correlations, the
conditioning test revealed a causal (and indeed dynamic) connection between a subject’s
immediate temporal focus and their self-orientation in the Ego-RP task test.
Overall, de la Fuente et al. propose a temporal-focus hypothesis, in which “People’s implicit
associations of “past” and “future” with “front” and “back” should depend on their temporal
focus. That is, in people’s mental models, they should place in front of them whichever pole
of the spacetime continuum they tend to “focus on” metaphorically – locating it where they
could focus on it literally with their eyes if events in time were visible objects.”173 Their
hypothesis is cleverly captured in the title of their paper, “When You Think About It, Your
Past Is in Front of You.”
In a study published in 2018, Li & Cao adapted the simulated Ego-RP task test (Fig. 5) and
temporal focus questionnaire developed by de la Fuente et al. for use in a Chinese context
and used them to investigate the ability of religion – “a prominent layer of culture”174 – to
influence temporal self-orientation. Buddhism is considered to be a past-focused religion
because its adherents’ actions are profoundly influenced by belief in karma; accordingly,
Buddhists “believe that the past practices cause the visible effects in the future and thus past
is more important for them.”175 In contrast, Taoism is particularly concerned with the future:
“immortality and transcendence are the critical components of Taoism (Girardot, 1988).
Taoists [...] constantly devote themselves to pursuing immortality from the present to the
future. Thus, the eternal life in the future appears to be more significant for Taoists than past
experiences.”176 Although Taoism is both “traditional” and “future-focused,” it is expedient
for our discussion to continue using “traditional” in its usual sense of “displaying attitudes
and practices modelled upon the past;” any departures from this convention will be made
explicit at the time.
In line with expectations from the temporal-focus hypothesis, in the Ego-RP task test, most of
the Buddhist monks (65-73%) conceptualised the past as ahead of them and the future as
behind them. The reverse was true for Taoist monks, of whom the majority (79-86%)
conceptualised the future as ahead of them and the past as behind them.177 In the temporal
focus questionnaire, Buddhists agreed more often with past-focused statements, whereas
Taoists agreed more with future-focused ones, and responses from an atheist control group
were evenly split between future- and past-focused statements.178 As with the Spanish/Darija
study, low TFI scores correlated strongly with a past-in-front outcome in the Ego-RP task
test.179
A pre-test conditioning exercise was used to test whether a short exposure to Dipamkara (an
iconic Buddha of the Past) or Maitreya (an iconic Buddha of the Future) influenced a
Buddhist monk’s temporal self-orientation. In the Ego-RP task test, the past-in-front
outcomes for the past-conditioned group (91%) were far higher than for the future-
conditioned group (44%), with both differing from the frequency for an unconditioned cohort

23
(68%).180 As with the Spanish/Darija study, the conditioning test revealed a causal and
dynamic connection between a subject’s immediate temporal focus and their self-orientation
in the Ego-RP task test. Religious conditioning was successful even with non-religious
cohorts; in a group of atheists primed by watching video clips about Buddhism, 75%
provided past-in-front responses to the Ego-RP task test, whereas in a group of atheists
primed by watching video clips about Taoism, 85% provided future-in-front responses.181
The responses of a control group consisting of unprimed atheists were split equally between
the two self-orientations.182

13. Integrating the experimental data and revisiting the ancient world
If focusing on the past places it in front of the thinker (Section 12), then perhaps the reverse
also holds true. We must therefore wonder if Aymara speakers’ self-orientation of past-in-
front (Section 11) causes them to value the past more than the future. Experimental data from
an unrelated cohort suggest that it should. Specifically, English-speakers who were trained to
use spatiotemporal metaphors in which the future was projected behind the body (out of
sight) and the past ahead of the body (within sight) considered past events to be more relevant
than did a control group using the canonical future-in-front metaphors.183
Equally, one could apply the causality in the opposite direction and propose that the past-in-
front self-orientation of Aymara speakers is the consequence of them focusing on the past.
Aymara society is very much a traditional one in which the past is prized over the future. For
example, Rafael Núñez’s research group lists them among “more traditional, pre-industrial
groups,”184 and the Conquistadors apparently considered them as shiftless – uninterested in
progress or going “forward” (in the Spanish understanding of the metaphor).185 In fact, Núñez
& Sweetser state directly that “Aymara speakers tend to speak more often and in more detail
about the past than about the future. Indeed, often elderly Aymara speakers simply refused to
talk about the future on the grounds that little or nothing sensible could be said about it.”186
Similarly, the past-in-front-of-Ego orientation hinted at by gestural analysis of some Siberian
and African languages (Section 11) may be due to the traditional nature of those societies and
an associated preoccupation with the past.
Taken together, the two preceding paragraphs amount to a metaphorical chicken-and-egg
conundrum; we cannot be sure whether Aymara-speakers’ past-in-front orientation causes
them to privilege the past, or whether their traditionalism and fixation on the past causes them
to see the past as in front of them. The situation is probably best viewed as a self-reinforcing
positive feedback cycle. We should note that the KNOWLEDGE IS VISION metaphor – proposed
earlier by Núñez & Sweetser as the basis of Aymara spatiotemporal mapping (Section 11) –
has not been abandoned, as it is an integral component of the temporal-focus hypothesis.
However, the new paradigm is broader and more comprehensive in scope.
Overall, it seems that the Aymara-speaking population’s dual preoccupation with the past and
with vision underpins their past-in-front-of-Ego orientation, which in turn informs the
dominant metaphor in their language. Although spatiotemporal metaphors need not reflect the
mental orientation of a speaker/writer with respect to time (Sections 1 & 6, and above for

24
Darija-speakers),187 it is likely to be advantageous if the dominant Ego-RP metaphor in a
language aligns with the habitual self-orientation of its speakers (as it does, for example, in
English; Section 10). In cognitive terms, from congruence comes synergy. Since congruence
is not unidirectional, the process is reciprocal: the spatiotemporal metaphor of past-in-front
reinforces Aymara speakers’ temporal self-orientation, and this in turn consolidates the
primacy of visual data and of the past in their thoughts.
Does this paradigm mean that – despite the refutation of grammar-based arguments from
“mixed metaphors” (Sections 4, 7 & 9) – ancient thinkers could have subscribed to a past-in-
front self-orientation after all? Presumably so, if their societies were traditional and focused
on the past. Presciently, Nicolas Wyatt bolstered his grammar-inspired argument that
speakers of ancient Semitic languages “saw the past as in front of them” by characterising
these societies as traditional and focused on the past, as well as stressing the pre-eminence of
vision and anticipating the role of religion in the process. Following a consideration of
Ugaritic king-lists, in 2005 he wrote:188
The experience of time expressed by means of an orientation into the past, towards memory
and tradition as in the range of vision, and as vital for the present well-being of society,
illustrates both a growing awareness of temporality, and also of its ancient roots in seeing
(perhaps in dreams and visions). The idea that you can contemplate your past either in real
vision, or in your mind’s eye, and determine your position in the world primarily with
reference to such a concern, can readily be seen to have enormous intellectual and social
implications. Tradition, conservatism, well-tried procedures, established patterns all show
how a society feels its way into the future by way of its security in the past. Religion [...]
is simply the epitome of such processes.
It is to testing the accuracy of this portrayal of the Ancient Near Eastern mindset, and the
extent to which it also applies to ancient Egypt, that we must now turn.

14. Traditionalism and ancient cultures

Ancient societies that devoted extensive resources to monumentality – such as the Egyptians
and Mesopotamians of the fourth to first millennia BCE – valued the past and the
remembrance thereof. As Serena Love points out, “the Latin word for monument translates to
mean ‘reminder,’” and the social motivation behind monumental architecture is memory.189
Nicolas Wyatt adds that “It is no accident that the etymological meaning of the Greek term
for ‘truth’ (άληθεια) means ‘not-forgetting’. Tradition is ‘true’, and theology is ‘true’ because
it is traditional.”190 A nexus between tradition and religion in the ancient world should come
as no surprise, given that we recently encountered religion as a sub-genre of traditionalism in
the modern world (Section 12). But, in that encounter, we saw that some traditional religions
are nevertheless future-focused. What of the religions of the Ancient Near East? Wyatt
clearly sees them as preoccupied with the past, observing that:191
it is above all in religious belief and practice, with its hallowing of tradition (the
experienced and reconstructed or invented past), and repetition in ritual of established,
normative patterns of behaviour, that we discern the formal impact of accumulated cultural
experience on a society. The significance of the psychology to which this evidence
witnesses is as follows: it is clear that memory of the past is a vital part in the life of a

25
 community. It is the past and the perpetuation of its paradigms and values which legitimizes
the present. Theology, mythology and ritual are the means whereby this memory is
reinforced by constant repetition, and the unknown future can therefore be engaged with
confidence.

For the ancient Egyptians, Erik Hornung connects religion with the past, or – more accurately
– connects the past with religion: “History is stylized but not falsified in ancient Egypt. It
resembles religious worship in that it too is celebrated in firmly established rituals.”192 In this
view of “history as religious celebration,”193 Jan Assmann explains that history consists of
“quasi-ritual reproduction of basic ritual patterns” in which “the meaning-imparting
illumination of mythic archetypes sheds light on any contemporary contingency.”194 Insofar
as there is a temporal dimension to Egyptian religion, it is “mythic, by which is meant sacred
tradition, ‘what is said about the gods,’ the presence of the divine in the cultural memory as
set down in myths, names, genealogies and other forms of tradition.”195 In other words, the
religious focus is overwhelmingly retrospective; all of its values are derived from the “mythic
past.” Let us turn now to a consideration of the non-religious sphere, insofar as one can be
discerned for the ancient inhabitants of Egypt and the Near East.
For most of pharaonic history, Egyptians looked to their past as both the inspiration and
template for their civilization;196 in Anthony Loprieno’s words, “The past is a classical model
to be emulated by the present, which is perceived as less prestigious.”197 As one facet of this
preoccupation with the past, the language of the twelfth Dynasty – Middle Egyptian – lived
on (alongside its vernacular successors) as the “classical” variety of Egyptian until the end of
ancient Egyptian history; as another, “The sculpture, reliefs and painting of the twelfth
Dynasty provide the models on which the academic training of Egyptian artists was focused
up until the time of the Ptolemies.”198 In fact, archaism was an endemic feature of Egyptian
culture from as early as the Old Kingdom.199 James Pritchard points out that “The word
sebayit ‘teaching,’ came to be used by the Egyptians for ‘wisdom,’ because of their
orientation toward the models of the past,”200 as seen for example in Ani’s exhortation to “Go
daily towards the traditional path.”201 In an essay titled “Looking Back into the Future,”
Dietrich Wildung speaks of the Egyptian kings’ perennial legitimation through a “reverential
use of history.”202 (And, like Egypt’s concept of eternity, its understanding of history can also
be characterised by analogy with grammatical verb forms.203) In practical terms, the primary
concern of individuals for the future beyond their own lifetimes seems to have been to ensure
– within the means at their disposal – that their identities and achievements were preserved
for posterity, accompanied by a mortuary cult to sustain them in the afterlife.204
The commemoration of individuals and events for posterity was also a priority for the elites
of the Ancient Near East. For example, the inscriptions on the statues of Gudea of Lagash
(ca. 2150-2125 BCE) record the activities and accomplishments of his life. Moreover, the
statues themselves were “a valid substitute for the person in perpetuity [...] to provide a form
of immortality. [...] The portrait statues were animate substitutes for the person represented
both during their own lifetime and long after.”205 Typically, the patrons of such statues
desired both an eternal representation before the gods and an enduring legacy for future

26
generations. Their concern for the future arose directly from their own valuing of the past and
from a keen awareness that they themselves would soon be part of it.
Similar to the retention of Middle Egyptian for formal writing in Egypt, Standard Babylonian
– the form of Akkadian spoken beginning of the second millennium BCE, and which even
then was full of archaisms – continued as the “classic language” of Mesopotamian
inscriptions throughout the first millennium BCE.206 Indeed, Sumerian – which had been the
spoken language of Babylonia in the third millennium BCE – was retained for religious and
scholarly writings over the same time-period.207 Archaic versions of cuneiform were
regularly used to write royal inscriptions.208 Historical consciousness peaked in expression
under rulers such as the Neo-Assyrian king Ashurbanipal (r. ca. 668-627 BCE), who
collected over 30,000 literary and scholarly tablets in his huge library at Nineveh.209 Another
conspicuous individual was the Neo-Babylonian king Nabonidus (555-539 BCE), an arch-
traditionalist whose excavations in the temple of the moon-god Nanna/Sin in Ur unearthed
inscriptions made by a former EN-Priestess, Enanedu (ca. 1828 BCE), and by King
Nebuchadnezzar I (1125-1104 BCE); Nabonidus used the recovered information to restore
the temple and to revive its cult, even appointing his own daughter as EN-Priestess.210 Zainab
Bahrani summarises the conservatism of the region well: “The ancient Mesopotamians were
constantly concerned with the reverence and respect for the remains of the past, and
Mesopotamia is the earliest place where we can study such deep historical consciousness
through textual and archaeological evidence. We can even say that the reverence for the past
and the concern with preservation of their ancient temples and cities was distinctive of
Mesopotamian cultures.”211
In the Hebrew bible, the word “remember” (root ‫ )זכר‬is used 234 times, mostly in
exhortations to the people of Israel.212 The retrospective, traditionalist nature of Israelite
society is evident in the instruction from the Song of Moses, Deut 32:7 “Remember the days
of old, consider the years long past” and the almost antiphonal response of Ps 77:5 & 11 “I
consider the days of old, and remember the years of long ago [; ...] I will call to mind the
deeds of the Lord; I will remember your wonders of old.” Biblical scholars refer to “Israel’s
reverence for its past.”213 This treasuring of the past was to become even more pronounced
among early Jews, who displayed a “self-effacing reverence for their Biblical past.”214 In an
article titled “Memory, Tradition, and the Construction of the Past in Ancient Israel,” Joseph
Blenkinsopp provides the following commentary on the Passover festival (Ex 12:14):215
Passover is both a remembering and a re-enacting of a shared past. The Passover seder is
couched in the plural – “we were Pharaoh’s slaves in Egypt” – but the individual participant
is also invited to internalize the collectively experienced past: “In every generation one
must look upon oneself as if one had in one’s own person come out of Egypt.” In the course
of time every gesture performed and every item of food eaten during the ceremony is given
its specific historical referent. There can be no clearer example of the pressure exerted by
the past on the present. Passover is the prime example of a commemorative ritual.

The family focus of the seder meal provides a useful reminder that power-relationships in
the Ancient Near East were largely patrimonial, i.e., the administrative structure was a
society-wide extension of the reciprocal obligations inherent in the traditional household.216

27
Accordingly, “house” is an emic category which reflects the structure of society at all levels
(e.g., ‫בית ישראל‬, “House of Israel,” Ps 135:19), within which individuals expressed
friendship, trust or dependency in terms of (fictive) kinship.217 Patrimonial authority requires
a belief in the innate value of familial traditions, including deference to patriarchal
authority.218 Moreover, “the extension of the social group through time [...] is often
expressed as the endurance of an eponymous ancestor’s household [e.g., ‫בית דוד‬, “House of
David,” 2 Sam 3:1]. This is reflected in reverence for deceased ancestors, who were thought
to have some kind of ongoing participation in the life of their household.”219 Up to – and, in
the case of Israel, including – the 1st millennium BCE,220 the Near East seems to have
operated on the basis of patrimonial administration. Egyptian society, too, was strongly
patrimonial, although from the late Middle Kingdom onward (i.e., after ca. 1850 BCE) an
overlay of governmental bureaucracy (i.e., a territorially-based rational officialdom
composed of officers appointed on job-related ability and skill) is increasingly evident.221
Writing on the general culture of the Ancient Near East, J.D. Ray observes that “All the
literate societies of the area needed to train an administrative class, and all probably
approached the problem in much the same way: complex writing systems required long
training, with emphasis on rote-learning and reverence for the past.” 222 He identifies within
this type of schooling, which was often temple-based, a “combination of tradition,
didacticism, and repeatable sentiment.”223 Kenton L. Sparks, too, acknowledges “the strong
momentum of tradition in ancient societies” of this region.224 Overall, it would seem that
Nicolas Wyatt’s representation of Ancient Near Eastern cultures as traditional, conservative
societies preoccupied with the past (Section 13) stands vindicated. In such societies, “The
past provided the paradigms for religious and social behaviour: myth and tradition alike were
‘given’, and one observed and honoured patterns established in tradition, by the gods and the
ancestors.”225

15. “Mixed metaphors” revisited

From the foregoing (Sections 12-14), one may reasonably assume that the traditionalism and
religious focus of ancient speakers would have inclined them to indulge in past-in-front-of-
Ego interpretations of “mixed metaphors” (Section 7), much as was done by the scholars
cited in Section 2.
For example, when Nebamun says of king Thutmose III saA.n=f wi r wn=i r-HA.t,226 “He made
me greater than I was before,” he may in fact be thinking of his former days as physically r-
HA.t – in front – of his eyes. Compounds such as m-HA.t and Xr-HA.t are open to the same
reading, so when Djehutyhotep says HA.tyw-a iri.w m-HA.t [...] n kAi ib=sn nn iri.n=i,227 “The
nomarchs who had acted before [...], their hearts could not have planned this [thing] which I
have done,” he may have been picturing these former leaders as spatially in front of him as
well as temporally prior to him. Similarly, we now have licence to reimagine the examples of
“mixed metaphors” discussed previously – the statements of Khentika-Pepi, the Teacher of
Ecclesiastes, Ezra, and even the Psalmist and Job (Section 7) – in a mode where the past was
in fact considered by the author to be visually in front of him.

28
Since the repeated use of past-in-front-of-Ego mappings enhances the importance of the past
to the speaker (Section 13),228 the habitual privileging of this perspective by ancient
Egyptians and Near Easterners in the interpretation of ambiguous metaphors would have
served to strengthen the traditional and past-oriented nature of their culture. As with Aymara
(Section 12), in this metaphorical chicken-and-egg situation we can discern the ingredients of
a self-reinforcing positive feedback cycle.

16. The “past-scape” – a snap-shot, not a movie

The past-in-front personal orientation seems naturally to be a static model; even Aymara
speakers – for whom it is the default model – do not seem to envision relative motion
between Ego and the time-scape.229 Accordingly, the “past-scape” is better thought of as a
static snap-shot rather than as a continuous movie, regardless of whether the latter consists
(metaphorically) of the view from the window of a train in which the video-camera operator
sits facing away from the direction of motion (Ego-RP, moving Ego), or the view from an
island where the operator sits facing downstream and records objects as they float past in the
river’s flow (Ego-RP, moving time).
From this, it follows that it is inappropriate to envisage the ancients as walking backwards
into the future or as sitting with their backs toward the source of the “river of time”(Section
8). The latter option would be particularly incongruous for the Egyptians, whose canonical
orientation in space was southward, so that their faces were turned toward the source of the
Nile (Section 8). Rather, we should conceptualise ancient thinkers as pausing frequently on
the forward-leading “path of life” and turning through 180° in order to place the past before
their gaze. In so doing, they were able to contemplate the (temporal) terrain already traversed
by their society, in fulfilment of their culture’s ongoing focus on the past and the traditions
arising from it.
Of course, one cannot actually pause time, and therefore nobody can truly stop on the
“journey of life.” But the construct promoted in this section is metaphorical, and metaphors
tend to be imperfect or incomplete. A metaphorical source domain often has attributes that
are not reflected by the target domain; as Núñez & Cooperrider explain, “humans do not map
space and time onto each other in an exhaustive fashion, but rather recruit a limited subset of
possible spatial experiences (e.g., forward motion along a path) for construing the full
complement of temporal experiences.”230 Moreover, a source domain usually does not
capture all aspects of the target domain. As John Sanders observes, “we typically use several
sources for the same target since a single metaphor does not disclose all that can be thought
about the target.” 231 Every metaphor and figure of speech involves a dash of poetic licence,
and an excessively literal approach will cause the analogy to fail.
The “snap-shot” analogy is in fact congruent with spatiotemporal conceptualisation in
languages of the modern world, whether Western or Eastern. Günter Radden has observed
that “static types of spatio-temporal relations outnumber dynamic types and, among static
relations, deictic [i.e., Ego-RP] types of spatio-temporal relations by far outnumber non-

29
deictic types.” 232 In apparent disagreement with Núñez & Sweetser and Moore (Section 11)
he adds that “[S]tatic deictic relations of time allow for more and more complex spatial
arrangements than dynamic relations.”233

17. The past is the future?

The retrospective gaze of the ancient Egyptian or Mesopotamian was probably quite alien to
the modern sense of history. As Erik Hornung observes, “The Egyptians had no
historiography as we know it, no objective narrative of the past. In their view the past was of
interest only to the extent that it was also the present and could be the future. [...] In other
words, working toward the future is actually striving toward the furthest imaginable point in
the past: the moment when our world began.”234 The aim of the civilization was in fact “to
restore to the world something of the perfection it enjoyed at the time of its origin.”235
The Ancient Near East, being politically and culturally more diverse than Egypt and
correspondingly more prone to strife and fragmentation, tended toward cosmogonies that
were predicated on divine conflict.236 However, there were exceptions. Like the Egyptian
origin-myths, the cosmogony of ancient Israel (Gen 1-11) was not impelled by divine conflict
and it posited, at the outset, a perfect creation. Did the Israelites therefore see the ideal future
as a return to an ideal past, and might signs of such past/future equivalence even be
embedded in their language? There is a grammatical construction in Biblical Hebrew in
which a prefixed waw – used as a consecutive conjunction – causes the meaning of the verb
forms that we normally translate using the past and future tenses to be exchanged; in a
surprising about-face, the imperfect now indicates the past and the perfect indicates the
future.237,238 Despite this linguistic curiosity and an awareness that history was inclined to
repeat itself, ancient Israelites were unlikely to have seen the past and future as
interchangeable. Rather, they studied the past to learn about YHWH’s attributes, demands and
self-imposed covenants in order to predict the future in the form of prophecy.239 This was
“revelation by means of history.”240 The lesson of time was relatively straightforward. When
sinful kings ruled in Jerusalem, they were punished and experienced military setbacks; when
righteous kings reigned and the people were faithful to the God of Israel, the kingdom
prospered and expanded.241
With the human world as the creation of angry or in-fighting gods,242 one might expect the
inhabitants of ancient Ugarit or Babylonia to have been less likely to want to return it to its
primal state, and thus to equate the future with the past. Accordingly, many scholars might
settle for saying of the Ancient Near East that “insofar as one might speak of a goal in
history, it was the establishment of a definitive, lasting kingship.”243 This aspiration was of
course shared by the Egyptians, for whom it was an interim goal, but there the teleological
overlap might end. For the Mesopotamians, like the Israelites, “It was possible, and even
likely, that history would repeat itself,” but for the former “the purposes of the gods were
indiscernible. [...] There was ignorance concerning where history was going (if anywhere),
and the inscrutable acts of the gods were only faintly divulged by the readable effects in the
omens.”244

30
Other scholars, however, do claim for Mesopotamia what Hornung claims for Egypt. There is
general agreement that Ancient Near Eastern cosmogonies “described not only the beginning
of things, but paradigmatic events that could be reenacted over and over.”245 Indeed, the
belief was that these events needed to be re-enacted repeatedly in ritual form because “th[e]
creation, or the order of the cosmos, is fragile and has to be reestablished periodically in the
face of recurring dangers,”246 just as “for the Egyptians, th[e] creation was not a onetime
occurrence; it needed continual repetition and regeneration.”247 Stefan Maul extends this line
of thinking to its logical conclusion. For him, “the focus of Mesopotamian culture is on the
past, and thus ultimately on the primordial point of all being,”248 with the intention that the
world should be returned to this Urpunkt. For example, Maul’s view of the excavation and
restoration of ancient temples by kings such as Nabonidus (Section 14) is that it reflects
the Mesopotamian notion of each thing in the world being allocated its own fixed,
unshakeable and eternal place. This divinely willed but historically altered place was to be
restored with the reconstruction of the old temple. Myths that have grown up around
Babylonian temples recount how these were not built by human hands but were erected by
the gods themselves as part of the work of creation at the beginning of time. Restoration of
the temple according to the undistorted divine plan was intended by the Babylonian kings
to transport both the state and its subjects back to their original, pristine, hallowed
beginnings. Hence, the search of Babylonians and Assyrians for “antiquity” emerges as a
striving after the unsullied original order of a “distant yore,” to which the gods themselves
had imparted form through the act of its creation. Mesopotamian culture was ever focused
on the origin of all things.249
Maul does not cite Hornung’s work as an inspiration, yet the similarity in these scholars’
claims for Mesopotamia and Egypt, respectively, is striking. If we accept Maul’s arguments,
then the Mesopotamians must be grouped with the Egyptians in wishing to restore a
disordered world to its original state. Certainly, the kings of both Egypt and Mesopotamia
“portrayed their campaigns against the enemies of the empire as the ever recurring primeval
battle of the World-God against the forces of chaos, ending with the triumph of world order
in the work of creation.”250
To the extent that a traditional society’s hope for the future is actually to return the world to
its original perfection, the past and the future may be thought of as interchangeable.251 A
compounding of the two temporal categories was suggested by Henri Frankfort when he
remarked that “Egyptians had very little sense of [...] past or future. [...] The past and the
future – far from being a matter of concern – were wholly implicit in the present.”252 Maul
has observed that “For Mesopotamian society the past already contained (pre-formed) all
possibilities for the future, and hence its preoccupation with bygone mythical or historical
epochs was simultaneously a preoccupation with the future.”253 In a mind-bending twist on
the LIFE IS A JOURNEY metaphor, Antonio Loprieno recently commented of the Egyptians
that “The present is always presented as following in the past’s footsteps.”254 If the present is
simultaneously headed into the future and the past, or if it is headed into a future which is
the past, then the future and the past must in some sense be identical.
Accordingly, the dominant polarity of an ancient Egyptian’s or Mesopotamian’s personal
orientation with respect to time (Sections 15 & 16) – and its opposition to our own – may not

31
be so important, at least not if we employ their way of thinking. After all, verb forms in the
Egyptian and Akkadian languages are primarily concerned with aspect – completedness vs.
uncompletedness of an action – rather than tense, the distinguishing between past, present
and future that is central to modern Western thinking.255

18. Conclusion
Grammatical constructs are deceptive; as we have seen, a common sleight-of-hand in respect
of the temporal reference point can prove highly misleading, and may encourage us to believe
that a speaker/writer sees the past as “in front of/before them” when the spatiotemporal terms
are in fact drawn from a model in which the past is “in front of/before the future.”
Prepositional and adverbial expressions do not necessarily dictate or reflect the
spatiotemporal orientation of a speaker/writer; we ourselves can happily speak of ancestors as
“those who have gone before us” while continuing to visualise the ancestral past as “far
behind us,” and when we “think back” to our origins we contemplate an era “long before our
time.” The ancient speaker/writer had a range of spatiotemporal metaphors at his or her
disposal, and – like us – was free to switch between (and even mix) mutually exclusive
models, just as we might speak of “looking ahead to the following weeks.”256 Insofar as they
pondered events yet to happen, ancient thinkers are likely to have worked in terms of the
ubiquitous LIFE IS A JOURNEY metaphor, with the future mapped to the path ahead and the past
falling behind them (Boxes B & C). But from the temporal focus hypothesis we know that the
ancients’ cultural and religious preoccupation with the past means that they will probably
have spent more time with the past “before them,” consistent with a switch to the
KNOWLEDGE IS VISION metaphor.

The past-in-front-of-Ego orientation seems naturally to be a static model – even for Aymara
speakers, for whom it is the default model. Its non-dynamic quality means that the “past-
scape” is better thought of as a snap-shot than a movie. It is therefore not appropriate to
envisage the ancients as walking backwards into the future or as sitting with their backs
toward the source of the “river of time.” Rather, we should conceptualise them as pausing
frequently on the forward-leading “path of life” and turning through 180° in order to place
the past before their gaze. In this way they were able to “see the past before them” and
contemplate the temporal terrain already traversed by their society. Traditional cultures
whose aim is to return the world to its original perfection may even see the past and future as
interchangeable. Accordingly, the dominant polarity of the ancient Egyptian’s or
Mesopotamian’s personal orientation with respect to time – and its opposition to our own –
may not be so important after all, at least not when considered from an emic perspective.
To recapitulate: cultural and religious preoccupation with the past means that thinkers will
spend more time seeing the past as in front of them, an orientation achieved by pausing on the
journey of life and turning about-face. That this was a major mode of thought for the ancients
of Egypt and the Near East may be inferred from the paucity of figures of speech in which the
future is explicitly pictured as residing in front of the author (Box A). Unlike our own
circumstances, the instances of an ancient author “looking forward” to a future event or
“putting the past behind him/her” seem to have been relatively infrequent and the expressions
themselves either ambivalent or short-lived. Although – as already noted – linguistic

32
constructs need not dictate or reflect the spatiotemporal orientation of a speaker/writer, there
is a cognitive advantage when they are congruent. The lack of overt future-in-front and past-
behind-self expressions is consistent with the predominance of a retrospective gaze in the
traditional, past-focused societies of dynastic Egypt and the Ancient Near East.

© Lloyd D. Graham, 2018 (excluding third party quotations and Fig. 2b). v.02_22.09.18.

Cite as: Lloyd D. Graham (2018) “Did ancient peoples of Egypt and the Near East really imagine themselves as
facing the past, with the future behind them?” online at
https://www.academia.edu/36840376/Did_ancient_peoples_of_Egypt_and_the_Near_East_really_imagine_the
mselves_as_facing_the_past_with_the_future_behind_them

Biblical quotations not otherwise attested are from the New Revised Standard Version.
All URLs were current at 14 Jun, 2018.

1
Bottini (2011), p.263-399; Sinha et al. (2011).
2
Lakoff & Johnson (2003), p.135 & 266; Haspelmath (1997), p.56-57 & 61-63; Radden (2003); Kövecses
(2010), p.9; Croft & Cruse (2004), p.195-196; Valenzuela & Soriano (2005), p.14.
3
Ó Dónaill (1977), p.400 & p.50, respectively.
4
Bible Hub, online at http://biblehub.com/hebrew/6924.htm; Wyatt (1999), p.536.
5
Short (2016), p.386-392. East Asian languages are more inclined to use a vertical timeline than Western ones,
with earlier times being above later ones; Radden (2011), p.38.
6
Short (2016), p. 394-396. On the cognitive aspects of cyclical and helical time, see Núñez & Cooperrider
(2013) p.225, Box 3.
7
Transliterations in this paper follow the convention of Ockinga (2012).
8
Hornung (1992), p.65-69; Assmann (2001), p.74-79; Allen (2010), p.227-229 & 267. Specifically, the term D.t 
corresponds to the Present Perfect in Egyptian [Ockinga (2012), p.38] insofar as it represents “the
continuation of the resulting condition in the present [...] the enduring continuation of that which [...] has
been completed in time;” Assmann (2001), p.76. And, just as the Hebrew imperfect is associated primarily
with the future, E.P. Uphill associates the imperfective nHH with future eternity. Pratico & Van Pelt (2007),
p.130 & 278; E.P. Uphill (2003), p.24.
9
Short (2016), p.394-396.
10
Hornung (1992), p.70-71.
11
E.g., Short (2016), p.399.
12
Cooperrider et al. (2014).
13
Cooperrider et al. (2014). 
14
Hornung (1992), p.66.
15
Faulkner (1962), p.162 & 194; Ockinga (2012), p.19-20 & 71.
16
Faulkner (1962), p.208; Ockinga (2012), p.71.
17
Bible Hub, online at http://biblehub.com/hebrew/6440.htm. On the plural grammar of panim, see ahead to the
last panel of Box A.
18
Bible Hub, online at http://biblehub.com/hebrew/6924.htm.
19
Wolff (1974), p.88.
20
Lipton (2008), p.288-289.
21
One for Israel (n.d.).
22
Quora (n.d.).
23
Wyatt (2014), p.126.
24
Wyatt (2014), p.128-129.
25
Wyatt (2007), p.141.
26
Wyatt (1999), p.536.

33
27
Maul (2008), p.15.
28
Stanford (1954) on Od. 24.541-2; cited by Moore (2014), p.134.
29
Radden (2011), p.37.
30
Ulrich et al. (2012) p.485.
31
Ulrich et al. (2012) p.494.
32
Núñez & Cooperrider (2013), p.223 (Box 1).
33
Lakoff & Johnson (2003), p.45.
34
Núñez & Sweetser (2006), p.442
35
Haspelmath (1997), p.56.
36
Núñez & Sweetser (2006), p.406.
37
We will distinguish more carefully between these two Ego-RP options in Section 5, where they are identified
as the “moving time” and “moving Ego” sub-models, respectively.
38
This is the “moving event” version of Event-RP; in the way that Fig. 1a (“moving time”) relates to Fig 1b
(“moving Ego”), one could also imagine a “moving time” variant in which the boats are anchored and
future events move toward them from the front, i.e. where time’s arrow moves from left to right.
39
Núñez & Cooperrider (2013), p.221.
40
E.g., Moore (2014), p.302.
41
Núñez & Sweetser (2006), p.406.
42
Evans (2013), p.7.
43
Fuhrman & Boroditsky (2010); Bottini (2011), p.242-262 & 329-332.
44
Núñez & Sweetser (2006), p.443 fn 4; Núñez & Cooperrider (2013), p.220-221.
45
As also explained by Short (2016), p.393.
46
The motorcycle clipart was modified by Paolo Sinigaglia from Image:ClipartmotoBlu.jpg, and is reproduced
here under Creative Commons licence CC-BY-SA-3.0( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ ).
Online via Wikimedia Commons at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:MotoClipart.png.
47
Also articulated by Núñez & Sweetser (2006), p.404.
48
Haspelmath (1997), p.59-60 & 144.
49
Núñez & Sweetser (2006), p.405-406. Lakoff & Johnson (2003), p.41-44, consider the two Ego-RP variants
to be “coherent metaphors” in that, in both cases, the future is in front of us and the past is behind us..
50
Haspelmath (1997), p.59.
51
Di Biase-Dyson (2012), p.254.
52
As we have seen in Section 2, and as the source paper goes on to document in detail.
53
The silence is all the more surprising since it later becomes clear that the author is aware of the Ego-RP vs.
Event-RP dichotomy.
54
Bible Hub, online at http://biblehub.com/hebrew/4279.htm.
55
Bible Hub, online at http://biblehub.com/hebrew/4279.htm; Oppenheim & Reiner (1977), p.105-113.
56
Oppenheim & Reiner (1977), p.52; Caplice (2002), p.15 & 39.
57
Wyatt (1999), p.536; for Assyrian, Oppenheim (1964), p.193-195.
58
Ó Dónaill (1977), p.1007. Romhainn is the 1.c.p. pronominal form of roimh.
59
Haspelmath (1997), p.56-57 & 61.
60
Moore (2014), p.121-131.
61
One could extend the list to include other languages, e.g. Estonian; Veismann (2016).
62
Shinohara & Pardeshi (2011), p.749-755.
63
Shinohara & Pardeshi (2011), p.756-757.
64
Moore (2014), p.191-205.
65
Haspelmath (1997), p.57. 
66
Liberman (2004).
67
Di Biase-Dyson (2012), p.270.
68
Demotic; Ritner (2003) p.489 incl. fn 45.
34
69
“Were” in the sense of “existed;” in English idiom, we would say “came” or similar. Osing (1982), Item 27, at
p.29-32 & Pl. 6a,b & Pl. 60; Di Biase-Dyson (2012), p.263.
70
Bible Hub, online at http://biblehub.com/interlinear/2_kings/23-25.htm.
71
Bible Hub, online at http://biblehub.com/interlinear/ecclesiastes/2-7.htm,
http://biblehub.com/interlinear/ecclesiastes/2-9.htm.
72
Bible Hub, online at http://biblehub.com/interlinear/ezra/9-10.htm.
73
Bible Hub, online at http://biblehub.com/hebrew/6924.htm.
74
Bible Hub, online at http://biblehub.com/interlinear/psalms/143.htm.
75
Bible Hub, online at http://biblehub.com/interlinear/job/29-2.htm.
76
Faulkner (1962), p.10.
77
Faulkner (1962), p.105.
78
Wilcke (1987), p.84.
79
Van Pelt (2007).
80
Núñez & Sweetser (2006), p.402. 
81
The 1.s. suffix pronoun (=i) on the Xr-HA.t compound is explicit in the inscription; see Kanawati & Evans
(2014), p.35-36 & Pl. 114 (b), col. 212-213. Also Nederhof (2009a); Simpson (2003b), p.424.
82
Paradoxically, Event-RP/Ego-RP “mixed metaphors” seem to be more abundant (or at least easier to identify)
in modern languages, perhaps because the datasets are far more extensive and our familiarity with them is
much deeper. Other causes may include the fact that the creators of these datasets are not restricted to
formally-trained scribal elites and the corpus encompasses much in the way of casual and individualistic
self-expression.
83
Núñez & Sweetser (2006), p.413-414.
84
Lakoff & Johnson (2003), p.41-44, call the “moving time” and “moving Ego” variants the TIME IS A MOVING
OBJECT metaphor and the TIME IS STATIONARY AND WE MOVE THOUGH IT metaphor, respectively. They
describe them as “coherent metaphors” because they “fit together,” a reflection of the fact that both are
sub-types of the Ego-RP model.
85
Derczynski (2017), p.142.
86
Strawn (2017), p.9.
87
Maul (2008), p.15.
88
One for Israel (n.d.).
89
Bird (2016).
90
Hornung (1992), p.66.
91
Haspelmath (1997), p.60
92
Faulkner (1962), p.21; Wyatt (2014), p.131-132.
93
This is of course an Ego-RP model, just like Fig. 1a, but to avoid any confusion between this and the
canonical Ego-RP configuration I have chosen a slightly different nomenclature.
94
This is of course an Ego-RP model, just like Fig. 1b, but to avoid any confusion between this and the
canonical Ego-RP configuration I have chosen a slightly different nomenclature. 
95
Vasunia (2001), p.106; HaCohen (2017); Wyatt (2014), p.131-132; Keßler (1977). The southward orientation
of the Egyptians contrasts with their neighbours in the Ancient Near East, whose canonical orientation was
(as we may have deduced from the first Hebrew quotation in Section 1) toward the East, where the sun
rose each morning. Since ymn, the Semitic cognate of the Egyptian imn, retains the primary meaning of
“right-hand side,” the cardinal point designated by its extended meaning in Hebrew, Ugaritic, etc., is the
South. See the references listed earlier in this note and Drinkard (1992).
96
Müller (2005).
97
Hart (2005), p.116.
98
Faulkner (1972), p.44 (Spell 17). In contrast, Paman-speaking Australian Aborigines from Pormpuraaw –
whom we shall meet in Section 11 – associate the past with the East because the sun rises there (earlier
time) and sets in the West (later time); Moore (2014), p.147-148.
99
Streck (2016), p.13. 
100
Streck (2003).

35
101
He means the “moving time” model as defined by Haspelmath, which is the same as our Event-RP model (as
explained in Section 5).
102
Radden (2011), p.38.
103
New Revised Standard Version.
104
For further examples from Egyptian wisdom literature, see Di Biase-Dyson (2016), p.456-457; Horn et al.
(2016).
105
For further examples from the Hebrew bible, see Băncilă (2009).
106
pLeiden I 370, line 18 & pKoller 5, 3-4, respectively, cited in Di Biase-Dyson (2006), p.270-271 incl. fn 73.
107
Di Biase-Dyson (2006), p.270-271 & 282-283.
108
KAR 104: 19-20 (SB).
109
Streck (2016), p.17.
110
Tobin (2003a), p.40; Nederhof (2009b).
111
Faulkner (1962), p.1.
112
Simpson (2003a), p.58; Nederhof (2011).
113
Ritner (2003a), p.387; Bouvier (2010).
114
Tobin (2003d), p.186; Nederhof (2009c).
115
Bible Hub, online at http://biblehub.com/interlinear/ezekiel/39-22.htm.
116
George (1999), p.24.
117
Speiser (1978), p.81
118
Oppenheim & Reiner (1977), p.52; Caplice (2002), p.39.
119
Caplice (2002), p.15.
120
Caplice (2002), p.22; Roth (2005), p.84.
121
Roth (2005), p.76-82.
122
Hebrew Pod 101 (n.d.).
123
Bible Hub, online at http://biblehub.com/hebrew/430.htm; Kautzsch & Cowley (1910), §124 (c).
124
Pratico & Van Pelt (2007), p.31.
125
Leprohon (2013), p.215.
126
Ockinga (2012), p.8, 149, 155, 161 & 157.
127
Ockinga (2012), p.157 & 161.
128
Ockinga (2012), p.160.
129
Tobin (2003a), p.33.
130
Ritner (2003c), p.513.
131
Ritner (2003c), p.523.
132
Bible Hub, online at http://biblehub.com/interlinear/proverbs/4-25.htm and
http://biblehub.com/interlinear/proverbs/4-26.htm.
133
Bible Hub, online at http://biblehub.com/interlinear/jeremiah/7-24.htm.
134
Tobin (2003b), p.165.
135
Tobin (2003c), p.168.
136
Tobin (2003d), p.185; Nederhof (2009c).
137
Tobin (2003e), p.215.
138
Bible Hub, online at http://biblehub.com/interlinear/ecclesiastes/2-16.htm.
139
Bible Hub, online at http://biblehub.com/interlinear/ezekiel/23-35.htm.
140
Oppenheim (1964), p.194.
141
Streck (2016), p.17.
142
Short (2016), p.391-392.
143
Núñez & Sweetser (2006), p.402.
144
Núñez & Sweetser (2006), p.401.
145
Núñez & Sweetser (2006), p.402.

36
146
Núñez & Sweetser (2006), p.418.
147
Núñez & Sweetser (2006), p.423-441.
148
Núñez & Sweetser (2006), p.438.
149
Núñez & Sweetser (2006), p.439.
150
Núñez & Sweetser (2006), p.440.
151
Núñez & Sweetser (2006), p.438-440.
152
Núñez & Sweetser (2006), p.439.
153
Núñez & Sweetser (2006), p.437.
154
Moore (2014), p.134-152.
155
Núñez & Cooperrider (2013), p.223, citing Walker et al. (2013) “Investigating Spatial Axis Recruitment in
Temporal Reckoning Through Acoustic Stimuli and Non-spatial Responses,” [Center for Research in
Language Technical Report 25], University of California, San Diego, p.1-10.
156
Filchenko (2016). See also Section 13.
157
Liberman (2004).
158
Núñez & Cooperrider (2013), p.226 (Table 1, Group 2); also, for Toba time, see Radden (2003), p.230-231.
159
Núñez & Cooperrider (2013), p.222-223 & p.226 (Table 1, Group 2).
160
Boroditsky & Gaby (2010); Núñez & Cooperrider (2013), p.226 (Table 1).
161
Boroditsky & Gaby (2010); Núñez & Cooperrider (2013), p.226 (Table 1). 
162
Adapted from Moore (2014), Diagram 12.2 (p.143).
163
Cook (2006).
164
Núñez & Cooperrider (2013), p.226 (Table 1).
165
The two mappings consist of an Event-RP model and a scheme in which the deictic centre is displaced from
and external to the timeline. The former presumably reflects the direction of time-axes on graphs and
calendars in the Western world (and thus in modern Israel) whereas the latter reflects the reading direction
of the language’s script (Section 4). Núñez & Cooperrider (2013), p.222 (Fig. 1) & 226 (Table 1).
166
De la Fuente et al. (2014), p.1684.
167
Adapted from de la Fuente et al. (2014), Fig. 1a (p.1684) and Li & Cao (2018), Fig. 1 (p.1045).
168
De la Fuente et al. (2014), p.1685 & Fig. 2.
169
De la Fuente et al. (2014), p.1685-1686.
170
De la Fuente et al. (2014), p.1685.
171
De la Fuente et al. (2014), p.1686-1687 & Fig. 4.
172
De la Fuente et al. (2014), p.1687-1688 & Fig. 5.
173
De la Fuente et al. (2014), p.1688.
174
Li & Cao (2018), p.1041.
175
Li & Cao (2018), p.1043 & 1046.
176
Li & Cao (2018), p.1043.
177
Li & Cao (2018), p.1043-1048.
178
Li & Cao (2018), p.1046 & 1048 & Figs. 2-3.
179
Li & Cao (2018), p.1046 & 1048.
180
Li & Cao (2018), p.1048-1050.
181
Li & Cao (2018), p.1050-1051.
182
Li & Cao (2018), p.1051.
183
Hömke (2013).
184
Cooperrider et al. (2014).
185
Kiderra (2006).
186
Núñez & Sweetser (2006), p.440.
187
De la Fuente et al. (2014), p.1689, comment that “implicit space-time mappings can change more flexibly
than explicit spatial metaphors for time in language, the way people are thinking about time at any moment
may be exactly reversed from the way they are talking about it.”

37
188
Wyatt (2014), p.129.
189
Love (2007), p.1170.
190
Wyatt (1999), p.535.
191
Wyatt (1999), p.536-537.
192
Hornung (1992), p.154.
193
Hornung (1992), p.147. 
194
Assmann (2001), p.158.
195
Assmann (2001), p.8.
196
Wegner (2010), p.120.
197
Loprieno (2003), p.152.
198
Wildung (2003), p.61-62.
199
Kahl (2010).
200
Wilson (1978), p.412 fn 1.
201
The Teaching of Ani, pBoulaq 4, 19.13; cited by Di Biase-Dyson (2016), p.53.
202
Wildung (2003), p.65.
203
Just as D.t and nHH have been likened to the perfect(ive) and imperfective, respectively (Section 1), the
mythic and archival versions of Egyptian history have been characterised in terms of the perfective aspect
and perfect tense, respectively. Loprieno (2003), p.142 & 149.
204
Love (2007), p.1170.
205
Bahrani (2017), p.150.
206
Maul (2008), p.16.
207
Maul (2008), p.16.
208
Maul (2008), p.17.
209
Bahrani (2017), p.248.
210
Gadd (1951), p.28; Stol (2016), p. 575-6; Studevent-Hickman et al. (2006), p. 393-395; Weadock (1975),
p.109; Garrison (2012), p.45; Graham (2017).
211
Bahrani (2017), p.354.
212
One for Israel (n.d.).
213
Campbell (2004).
214
Weitzman (1997), p.128.
215
Blenkinsopp (1997), p.79.
216
Schloen (2001), p.49-89; Garfinkle (2008), p.55-61.
217
Schloen (2001), p.71.
218
Schloen (2001), p.66-67.
219
Schloen (2001), p.71.
220
Master (2001).
221
Wegner (2010), p.135-139.
222
Ray (1995), p.17-18.
223
Ray (1995), p.18.
224
Sparks (2005), p.20.
225
Wyatt (2007), p.141.
226
Di Biase-Dyson (2012), p.269.
227
Di Biase-Dyson (2012), p.262.
228
Hömke (2013).
229
Núñez & Sweetser (2006), p.438-440.
230
Núñez & Cooperrider (2013), p.221.
231
Sanders (2016), p.59.
232
Radden (2011), p.35.

38
233
Radden (2011), p.35.
234
Hornung (1992), p.154 & 164.
235
Hornung (1992), p.164.
236
Collins (2007), p.60-61.
237
Weingreen (1939), p.90 & 252; Joüon (1996), p.387; Pratico & Van Pelt (2007), p.195-196 & 277-278.
238
In Egyptian, too, there are unexpected exchanges of verb form which are seemingly accompanied by tense
shifts, but these concern negation and do not connect the past with the future. Specifically, when prefaced
with the negative n, the sDm.n=f verb form that normally represents the Perfect (completed action, and
therefore usually translated as past tense) now denotes the present. At first sight the switch appears
reciprocal, in that sDm=f normally indicates the present and the negative n sDm=f denotes the Perfect, but
the verb form in this negated expression is understood to be a Historic Perfect, which also has the
morphology sDm=f [Ockinga (2012), p.79-81 & 83]. Unexpected “tense shifts” of this kind can be
considered an artefact of translation, insofar as Egyptian verb forms are primarily concerned with aspect
whereas English verbs focus on tense [Allen (2010), p.239-240 & 269]. The aspect/tense contrast is
commented upon in the main text of this section. Hebrew verbs, too, are primarily aspectual, but it is more
difficult to explain away the “past/future” exchange referenced in the preceding note.
239
Walton (1990), p.123-124.
240
Newson (2006), p.306.
241
Finkelstein & Silberman (2001), p.231.
242
See the Baal Myth for Ugarit (COS 1.86), Enuma Elish (COS 1.111) and Atrahasis (COS 1.130) for the
Babylonians.
243
Collins (2007), p.68.
244
Walton (1990), p.123.
245
Collins (2007), p.65.
246
Collins (2007), p.60.
247
Hornung (1992), p.163. The concept is no doubt related to the “everlasting recurrence” of cyclical time, nHH,
encountered in Section 1.
248
“«Das Augenmerk» der mesopotamischen Kultur in die Vergangenheit und damit letzlich auf den Urpunkt
allen Seins gerichtet ist;” Maul (1997), p.110.
249
Maul (2008), p.19.
250
Maul (2008), p.21; Richards (2010), p.56-57. For an extended comparison of kingship in the two regions, see
Hill et al. (2014).
251
Note, for example, that the past and future senses of r-HA.t in Egyptian are, in both cases, static rather than
dynamic. Of the future sense, Di Biase Dyson writes that “ the Egyptian example demonstrates only the
static fact that the future is in front, not a dynamic movement of an event towards a person” or of a person
toward an event. Di Biase Dyson (2012), p.271.
252
Frankfort (1951), p.9. In fairness, we should note that the compounding of the past with the present – a
failure to see the past as past, so to speak – persisted in European thought until after the Middle Ages;
Hayes (2013), p.23 & 34.
253
Maul (2008), p.21-22.
254
Loprieno (2003), p.141. Note that the quotation blends the mutually exclusive Ego-RP variants of “moving
time” and “moving Ego;” time is described as walking, but clearly it is the deictic “now” – and therefore
Ego – that is actually doing the travelling along the path of time. In terms of metaphor, this is both LIFE IS A
JOURNEY and TIME IS EGO’S MOTION ALONG A PATH (Section 3). Moreover, the future (i.e., where Ego is
headed) has already been traversed by the past, since its footsteps are there. Truly, this metaphor is more
mixed than is usual.
255
Allen (2010), p.154; Caplice (2002), p.24-35; Barthélemy (1998).
256
This last example is taken from Lakoff & Johnson (2003), p.41. 

39
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Hieroglyphs, 2nd edn., Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Assmann, Jan (2001) The Search for God in Ancient Egypt, [Ägypten: Theologie und Frömmigkeit
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